Stay or Stray - A Dynamical Systems Viewpoint of Popularity Bias
Popularity bias in recommendation systems arises when a majority user class generates disproportionate interaction data, causing the system to increasingly favour it while degrading recommendation quality for niche users. While extensive empirical evidence of popularity bias exists, the dynamics leading to its emergence are not well understood. In this work, we study the coupled evolution of recommender model updates and user engagement through the lens of dynamical systems. We formulate a stochastic process and analyse its asymptotic behaviour through an ordinary differential equation (ODE) framework grounded in two-time-scale stochastic approximation. We characterise the equilibrium poi...
| Authors | Sarvesh Shashidhar, Lankireddy Prabhat, Arpit Agarwal et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.HC |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 August 2026 |
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