Retentive Decision Transformer with Adaptive Masking for Reinforcement Learning based Recommendation Systems

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning-based Recommender Systems (RLRS) have shown promise across a spectrum of applications, from e-commerce platforms to streaming services. Yet, they grapple with challenges, notably in crafting reward functions and harnessing large pre-existing datasets within the RL framework. Recent advancements in offline RLRS provide a solution for how to address these two challenges. However, existing methods mainly rely on the transformer architecture, which, as sequence lengths increase, can introduce challenges associated with computational resources and training costs. Additionally, the prevalent methods employ fixed-length input trajectories, restricting their capacity to capture evolving user preferences. In this study, we introduce a new offline RLRS method to deal with the above problems. We reinterpret the RLRS challenge by modeling sequential decision-making as an inference task, leveraging adaptive masking configurations. This adaptive approach selectively masks input tokens, transforming the recommendation task into an inference challenge based on varying token subsets, thereby enhancing the agent's ability to infer across diverse trajectory lengths. Furthermore, we incorporate a multi-scale segmented retention mechanism that facilitates efficient modeling of long sequences, significantly enhancing computational efficiency. Our experimental analysis, conducted on both online simulator and offline datasets, clearly demonstrates the advantages of our proposed method.