Optimizing Interactive Systems with Data-Driven Objectives

Ziming Li, Artem Grotov, Julia Kiseleva, Maarten de Rijke and Harrie Oosterhuis
Published in arXiv Preprint, 2018. [pdf]

Effective optimization is essential for interactive systems to provide a satisfactory user experience. However, it is often challenging to find an objective to optimize for. Generally, such objectives are manually crafted and rarely capture complex user needs accurately. Conversely, we propose an approach that infers the objective directly from observed user interactions. These inferences can be made regardless of prior knowledge and across different types of user behavior. Then we introduce: Interactive System Optimizer (ISO), a novel algorithm that uses these inferred objectives for optimization. Our main contribution is a new general principled approach to optimizing interactive systems using data-driven objectives. We demonstrate the high effectiveness of ISO over several GridWorld simulations.

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Recommended citation:

Z. Li, A. Grotov, J. Kiseleva, M. de Rijke, H. Oosterhuis. "Optimizing Interactive Systems with Data-Driven Objectives." In arXiv preprint. 2018.