{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quantifying-availability-and-discovery-in","title":"Quantifying Availability and Discovery in Recommender Systems via Stochastic Reachability","arxiv_id":"2107.00833","date":"2021-06-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mihaela Curmei","Sarah Dean","Benjamin Recht"],"abstract":"In this work, we consider how preference models in interactive recommendation systems determine the availability of content and users' opportunities for discovery. We propose an evaluation procedure based on stochastic reachability to quantify the maximum probability of recommending a target piece of content to an user for a set of allowable strategic modifications. This framework allows us to compute an upper bound on the likelihood of recommendation with minimal assumptions about user behavior. Stochastic reachability can be used to detect biases in the availability of content and diagnose limitations in the opportunities for discovery granted to users. We show that this metric can be computed efficiently as a convex program for a variety of practical settings, and further argue that reachability is not inherently at odds with accuracy. We demonstrate evaluations of recommendation algorithms trained on large datasets of explicit and implicit ratings. Our results illustrate how preference models, selection rules, and user interventions impact reachability and how these effects can be distributed unevenly.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00833v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.00833v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantifying-availability-and-discovery-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"interactive-recommendation","task_name":"Interactive Recommendation"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2107.00833","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2107.00833"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"85495c7b0787db86","entry":"setup_stochastic_reachability_knn","repo":"modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/stochastic_reachability_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability/blob/HEAD/utils/stochastic_reachability_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"85495c7b0787db86"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"053e2651951f3f82","entry":"setup_stochastic_reachability_ease","repo":"modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/stochastic_reachability_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/modestyachts/stochastic-rec-reachability/blob/HEAD/utils/stochastic_reachability_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"053e2651951f3f82"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}