Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Recommender Systems

In session-based or sequential recommendation, it is important to consider a number of factors like long-term user engagement, multiple types of user-item interactions such as clicks, purchases etc. The current state-of-the-art supervised approaches fail to model them appropriately. Casting sequential recommendation task as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem is a promising direction. A major component of RL approaches is to train the agent through interactions with the environment. However, it is often problematic to train a recommender in an on-line fashion due to the requirement to expose users to irrelevant recommendations. As a result, learning the policy from logged implicit feedback is of vital importance, which is challenging due to the pure off-policy setting and lack of negative rewards (feedback). In this paper, we propose self-supervised reinforcement learning for sequential recommendation tasks. Our approach augments standard recommendation models with two output layers: one for self-supervised learning and the other for RL. The RL part acts as a regularizer to drive the supervised layer focusing on specific rewards (e.g., recommending items which may lead to purchases rather than clicks) while the self-supervised layer with cross-entropy loss provides strong gradient signals for parameter updates. Based on such an approach, we propose two frameworks namely Self-Supervised Q-learning (SQN) and Self-Supervised Actor-Critic (SAC). We integrate the proposed frameworks with four state-of-the-art recommendation models. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.