A Reinforcement Learning and Recurrent Neural Network Based Dynamic User Modeling System

Abstract

With the exponential growth in areas of machine intelligence, the world has witnessed promising solutions to the personalized content recommendation. The ability of interactive learning agents to take optimal decisions in dynamic environments has been very well conceptualized and proven by Reinforcement Learning (RL). The learning characteristics of Deep-Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (DBRNN) in both positive and negative time directions has shown exceptional performance as generative models to generate sequential data in supervised learning tasks. In this paper, we harness the potential of the said two techniques and strive to create personalized video recommendation through emotional intelligence by presenting a novel context-aware collaborative filtering approach where intensity of users' spontaneous non-verbal emotional response towards recommended video is captured through system-interactions and facial expression analysis for decision-making and video corpus evolution with real-time data streams. We take into account a user's dynamic nature in the formulation of optimal policies, by framing up an RL-scenario with an off-policy (Q-Learning) algorithm for temporal-difference learning, which is used to train DBRNN to learn contextual patterns and generate new video sequences for the recommendation. Evaluation of our system with real users for a month shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and models a user's emotional preferences very well with stable convergence.