Title
An Adversarial Imitation Click Model for Information Retrieval
Abstract
ABSTRACT Modern information retrieval systems, including web search, ads placement, and recommender systems, typically rely on learning from user feedback. Click models, which study how users interact with a ranked list of items, provide a useful understanding of user feedback for learning ranking models. Constructing ”right” dependencies is the key of any successful click model. However, probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) have to rely on manually assigned dependencies, and oversimplify user behaviors. Existing neural network based methods promote PGMs by enhancing the expressive ability and allowing flexible dependencies, but still suffer from exposure bias and inferior estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Adversarial Imitation Click Model (AICM), based on imitation learning. Firstly, we explicitly learn the reward function that recovers users’ intrinsic utility and underlying intentions. Secondly, we model user interactions with a ranked list as a dynamic system instead of one-step click prediction, alleviating the exposure bias problem. Finally, we minimize the JS divergence through adversarial training and learn a stable distribution of click sequences, which makes AICM generalize well across different distributions of ranked lists. A theoretical analysis has indicated that AICM reduces the exposure bias from O(T2) to O(T). Our studies on a public web search dataset show that AICM not only outperforms state-of-the-art models in traditional click metrics but also achieves superior performance in addressing the exposure bias and recovering the underlying patterns of click sequences.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3442381.3449913
International World Wide Web Conference
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Click Model, Imitation Learning, Document Ranking
Conference
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
11
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xinyi Dai1273.19
Jianghao Lin240.76
Weinan Zhang3122897.24
Shuai Li419223.09
Weiwen Liu54510.55
Ruiming Tang612519.25
Xiuqiang He731239.21
Jianye Hao818955.78
Jun Wang9164.99
Yong Yu107637380.66