Streaming Stochastic Submodular Maximization with On-Demand User Requests

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We explore a novel problem in streaming submodular maximization, inspired by the dynamics of news-recommendation platforms. We consider a setting where users can visit a news website at any time, and upon each visit, the website must display up to k news items. User interactions are inherently stochastic: each news item presented to the user is consumed with a certain acceptance probability by the user, and each news item covers certain topics. Our goal is to design a streaming algorithm that maximizes the expected total topic coverage. To address this problem, we establish a connection to submodular maximization subject to a matroid constraint.