Balancing Information Perception with Yin-Yang: Agent-Based Information Neutrality Model for Recommendation Systems

While preference-based recommendation algorithms effectively enhance user engagement by recommending personalized content, they often result in the creation of ``filter bubbles''. These bubbles restrict the range of information users interact with, inadvertently reinforcing their existing viewpoints. Previous research has focused on modifying these underlying algorithms to tackle this issue. Yet, approaches that maintain the integrity of the original algorithms remain largely unexplored. This paper introduces an Agent-based Information Neutrality model grounded in the Yin-Yang theory, namely, AbIN. This innovative approach targets the imbalance in information perception within existing recommendation systems. It is designed to integrate with these preference-based systems, ensuring the delivery of recommendations with neutral information. Our empirical evaluation of this model proved its efficacy, showcasing its capacity to expand information diversity while respecting user preferences. Consequently, AbIN emerges as an instrumental tool in mitigating the negative impact of filter bubbles on information consumption.

BHEISR: Nudging from Bias to Balance -- Promoting Belief Harmony by Eliminating Ideological Segregation in Knowledge-based Recommendations

In the realm of personalized recommendation systems, the increasing concern is the amplification of belief imbalance and user biases, a phenomenon primarily attributed to the filter bubble. Addressing this critical issue, we introduce an innovative intermediate agency (BHEISR) between users and existing recommendation systems to attenuate the negative repercussions of the filter bubble effect in extant recommendation systems. The main objective is to strike a belief balance for users while minimizing the detrimental influence caused by filter bubbles. The BHEISR model amalgamates principles from nudge theory while upholding democratic and transparent principles. It harnesses user-specific category information to stimulate curiosity, even in areas users might initially deem uninteresting. By progressively stimulating interest in novel categories, the model encourages users to broaden their belief horizons and explore the information they typically overlook. Our model is time-sensitive and operates on a user feedback loop. It utilizes the existing recommendation algorithm of the model and incorporates user feedback from the prior time frame. This approach endeavors to transcend the constraints of the filter bubble, enrich recommendation diversity, and strike a belief balance among users while also catering to user preferences and system-specific business requirements. To validate the effectiveness and reliability of the BHEISR model, we conducted a series of comprehensive experiments with real-world datasets. These experiments compared the performance of the BHEISR model against several baseline models using nearly 200 filter bubble-impacted users as test subjects. Our experimental results conclusively illustrate the superior performance of the BHEISR model in mitigating filter bubbles and balancing user perspectives.

DOR: A Novel Dual-Observation-Based Approach for News Recommendation Systems

Online social media platforms offer access to a vast amount of information, but sifting through the abundance of news can be overwhelming and tiring for readers. personalised recommendation algorithms can help users find information that interests them. However, most existing models rely solely on observations of user behaviour, such as viewing history, ignoring the connections between the news and a user's prior knowledge. This can result in a lack of diverse recommendations for individuals. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the complex problem of news recommendation. Our approach is based on the idea of dual observation, which involves using a deep neural network with observation mechanisms to identify the main focus of a news article as well as the focus of the user on the article. This is achieved by taking into account the user's belief network, which reflects their personal interests and biases. By considering both the content of the news and the user's perspective, our approach is able to provide more personalised and accurate recommendations. We evaluate the performance of our model on real-world datasets and show that our proposed method outperforms several popular baselines.

Proceedings of Principle and practice of data and Knowledge Acquisition Workshop 2022

Over the past two decades, PKAW has provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the state-of-the-arts in the area of knowledge acquisition and machine intelligence (MI, also Artificial Intelligence, AI). PKAW2022 will continue the above focus and welcome the contributions on the multi-disciplinary approach of human and big data-driven knowledge acquisition, as well as AI techniques and applications.

GAC: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Model Toward User Incentivization in Unknown Social Networks

In recent years, providing incentives to human users for attracting their attention and engagement has been widely adopted in many applications. To effectively incentivize users, most incentive mechanisms determine incentive values based on users' individual attributes, such as preferences. These approaches could be ineffective when such information is unavailable. Meanwhile, due to the budget limitation, the number of users who can be incentivized is also restricted. In this light, we intend to utilize social influence among users to maximize the incentivization. By directly incentivizing influential users in the social network, their followers and friends could be indirectly incentivized with fewer incentives or no incentive. However, it is difficult to identify influential users beforehand in the social network, as the influence strength between each pair of users is typically unknown. In this work, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning-based framework, named Geometric Actor-Critic (GAC), to discover effective incentive allocation policies under limited budgets. More specifically, the proposed approach can extract information from a high-level network representation for learning effective incentive allocation policies. The proposed GAC only requires the topology of the social network and does not rely on any prior information about users' attributes. We use three real-world social network datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed GAC. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Identifying Influential Users in Unknown Social Networks for Adaptive Incentive Allocation Under Budget Restriction

In recent years, recommendation systems have been widely applied in many domains. These systems are impotent in affecting users to choose the behavior that the system expects. Meanwhile, providing incentives has been proven to be a more proactive way to affect users' behaviors. Due to the budget limitation, the number of users who can be incentivized is restricted. In this light, we intend to utilize social influence existing among users to enhance the effect of incentivization. Through incentivizing influential users directly, their followers in the social network are possibly incentivized indirectly. However, in many real-world scenarios, the topological structure of the network is usually unknown, which makes identifying influential users difficult. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for exploring influential users in unknown networks, which can estimate the influential relationships among users based on their historical behaviors and without knowing the topology of the network. Meanwhile, we design an adaptive incentive allocation approach that determines incentive values based on users' preferences and their influence ability. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches by conducting experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

ABEM: An Adaptive Agent-based Evolutionary Approach for Mining Influencers in Online Social Networks

A key step in influence maximization in online social networks is the identification of a small number of users, known as influencers, who are able to spread influence quickly and widely to other users. The evolving nature of the topological structure of these networks makes it difficult to locate and identify these influencers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive agent-based evolutionary approach to address this problem in the context of both static and dynamic networks. This approach is shown to be able to adapt the solution as the network evolves. It is also applicable to large-scale networks due to its distributed framework. Evaluation of our approach is performed by using both synthetic networks and real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art seeding algorithms in terms of maximizing influence.