Long-Term Value of Exploration: Measurements, Findings and Algorithms

Yi Su, Xiangyu Wang, Elaine Ya Le, Liang Liu, Yuening Li, Haokai Lu, Benjamin Lipshitz, Sriraj Badam, Lukasz Heldt, Shuchao Bi, Ed H. Chi, Cristos Goodrow, Su-Lin Wu, Lexi Baugher, Minmin Chen

Abstract: Effective exploration is believed to positively influence the long-term user experience on recommendation platforms. Determining its exact benefits, however, has been challenging. Regular A/B tests on exploration often measure neutral or even negative engagement metrics while failing to capture its long-term benefits. We here introduce new experiment designs to formally quantify the long-term value of exploration by examining its effects on content corpus, and connecting content corpus growth to the long-term user experience from real-world experiments. Once established the values of exploration, we investigate the Neural Linear Bandit algorithm as a general framework to introduce exploration into any deep learning based ranking systems. We conduct live experiments on one of the largest short-form video recommendation platforms that serves billions of users to validate the new experiment designs, quantify the long-term values of exploration, and to verify the effectiveness of the adopted neural linear bandit algorithm for exploration.