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Omer Ben-Porat

14 accepted papers

2024

Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs

AAAI 2024technical

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we…

2023

Frustratingly Easy Truth Discovery

AAAI 2023technical

Truth discovery is a general name for a broad range of statistical methods aimed to extract the correct answers to questions, based on multiple answers coming from noisy sources. For example, workers in a crowdsourcing platform. In this paper, we consider an extremely simple heuristic for estimating…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Modeling Attrition in Recommender Systems with Departing Bandits

AAAI 2022technical

Traditionally, when recommender systems are formalized as multi-armed bandits, the policy of the recommender system influences the rewards accrued, but not the length of interaction. However, in real-world systems, dissatisfied users may depart (and never come back). In this work, we propose a novel…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2021

Protecting the Protected Group: Circumventing Harmful Fairness

AAAI 2021technical

The recent literature on fair Machine Learning manifests that the choice of fairness constraints must be driven by the utilities of the population. However, virtually all previous work makes the unrealistic assumption that the exact underlying utilities of the population (representing private tastes…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2020

Content Provider Dynamics and Coordination in Recommendation Ecosystems

NeurIPS 2020poster

Recommendation Systems like YouTube are vibrant ecosystems with two types of users: Content consumers (those who watch videos) and content providers (those who create videos). While the computational task of recommending relevant content is largely solved, designing a system that guarantees high soc…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2020

Optimizing Long-term Social Welfare in Recommender Systems: A Constrained Matching Approach

ICML 2020poster

Most recommender systems (RS) research assumes that a user’s utility can be maximized independently of the utility of the other agents (e.g., other users, content providers). In realistic settings, this is often not true – the dynamics of an RS ecosystem couple the long-term utility of all agents. I…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2020

Predicting Strategic Behavior from Free Text (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2020poster

The connection between messaging and action is fundamental both to web applications, such as web search and sentiment analysis, and to economics. However, while prominent online applications exploit messaging in natural (human) language in order to predict non-strategic action selection, the economi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Recommendation Systems with Strategic Content Providers

NeurIPS 2018poster

We introduce a game-theoretic approach to the study of recommendation systems with strategic content providers. Such systems should be fair and stable. Showing that traditional approaches fail to satisfy these requirements, we propose the Shapley mediator. We show that the Shapley mediator satisfies…

Cited by 93SourcePDFScholar