Top-K Contextual Bandits with Equity of Exposure

Abstract

The contextual bandit paradigm provides a general framework for decision-making under uncertainty. It is theoretically well-defined and well-studied, and many personalisation use-cases can be cast as a bandit learning problem. Because this allows for the direct optimisation of utility metrics that rely on online interventions (such as click-through-rate (CTR)), this framework has become an attractive choice to practitioners. Historically, the literature on this topic has focused on a one-sided, user-focused notion of utility, overall disregarding the perspective of content providers in online marketplaces (for example, musical artists on streaming services). If not properly taken into account – recommendation systems in such environments are known to lead to unfair distributions of attention and exposure, which can directly affect the income of the providers. Recent work has shed a light on this, and there is now a growing consensus that some notion of “equity of exposure” might be preferable to implement in many recommendation use-cases.