Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2401.05304

Can Probabilistic Feedback Drive User Impacts in Online Platforms?

Jessica Dai·Bailey Flanigan·Nika Haghtalab·Meena Jagadeesan·Chara Podimata
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

A common explanation for negative user impacts of content recommender systems is misalignment between the platform's objective and user welfare. In this work, we show that misalignment in the platform's objective is not the only potential cause of unintended impacts on users: even when the platform's objective is fully aligned with user welfare, the platform's learning algorithm can induce negative downstream impacts on users. The source of these user impacts is that different pieces of content may generate observable user reactions (feedback information) at different rates; these feedback rates may correlate with content properties, such as controversiality or demographic similarity of the creator, that affect the user experience. Since differences in feedback rates can impact how often the learning algorithm engages with different content, the learning algorithm may inadvertently promote content with certain such properties. Using the multi-armed bandit framework with probabilistic feedback, we examine the relationship between feedback rates and a learning algorithm's engagement with individual arms for different no-regret algorithms. We prove that no-regret algorithms can exhibit a wide range of dependencies: if the feedback rate of an arm increases, some no-regret algorithms engage with the arm more, some no-regret algorithms engage with the arm less, and other no-regret algorithms engage with the arm approximately the same number of times. From a platform design perspective, our results highlight the importance of looking beyond regret when measuring an algorithm's performance, and assessing the nature of a learning algorithm's engagement with different types of content as well as their resulting downstream impacts.

Explore related subjects

cs.LGcs.CY

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Jessica Dai, Bailey Flanigan, Nika Haghtalab, Meena Jagadeesan, Chara Podimata. 2024-01-10. Can Probabilistic Feedback Drive User Impacts in Online Platforms?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05304

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence

Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

When More Is Not Better: Component Anti-Synergy in a P300 Speller

P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers can provide hands-free communication for people with severe motor impairments. Modern pipelines combine multiple individually promising components, often assuming that 'more-is-better'. We tested this assumption using a four-component full-factorial experiment varying the inclusion of Euclidean Alignment (EA), xDAWN spatial filtering, subject calibration, and language model priors on a public P300 dataset. Performance was evaluated using accuracy, repetitions, and information transfer rate (ITR) with mixed-effects models. Results show that the value of components is conditional rather than additive. Calibration was the strongest singular contributor, while EA compensated for its absence in zero-calibration settings. Adding independently useful components could also reduce performance, revealing component anti-synergy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, LM support was not universally beneficial: its effect depends strongly on the strength of the underlying EEG pipeline, while results from a larger LM showed a similar pattern. Together, these findings challenge maximal 'all-on' pipeline design and highlight the value of selecting spatial and language-support components according to the quality of available EEG evidence.

cs.LG↗