Recommendation systems (RS) play a crucial role in assisting decision-making but often suffer from either a lack of credibility or unfairness problems. A few recommendation models have endeavored to address the problem from only one aspect, and approaches to solving both problems remain to be explored. This paper aims to construct a generalized fairness-based recommendation framework that can also provide the credibility of recommendation models. Generally, we propose a reliable and fair recommendation framework called Conformalized User Group Fairness (CUGF) based on the inspiration of conformal prediction. Specifically, we construct dynamic prediction sets that are guaranteed to cover the true item with a user pre-specified probability to ensure credibility while designing novel fairness metrics based on empirical risks to guarantee the fairness of users across different groups. Furthermore, we design a novel CUGF Algorithm to optimize the parameter γ that dominates the prediction sets and also the fairness. Besides, we conduct extensive experiments by applying CUGF on top of various recommendation models and representative datasets to validate its effectiveness with respect to recommendation performance (in terms of average set size) and fairness (in terms of the two defined fairness metrics), the results of which demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework.

Partial label learning (PLL) allows each instance to be annotated with a set of candidate labels, but only one is the ground-truth label. Although the state-of-the-art (SOTA) PLL models have shown competitive performance, they cannot get rid of the negative influence from the noisy false-positive labels during the training process. This leads to a large extent of uncertainty of PLL models’ prediction, and it becomes unreliable to trust a PLL model’s performance only by its prediction accuracy. To bridge this gap, we develop a new framework to quantify the uncertainty for PLL models with valid confidence guarantee, which is named as Conformal Prediction for Partial Label Learning (CP-PLL). This framework can be implemented on top of any PLL method to quantify their predictive confidence in terms of average prediction set size with a use-specified error rate or coverage/confidence level (i.e., probability). We prove that the coverage guarantee in PLL still holds, that is, the ground-truth label can be covered in the constructed prediction set with the user pre-defined error rate α when we use the noisy calibration data to carlibrate the PLL models, which yields to a probability interval of [1- α, 1- α + 1/n+1 + ε]. Extensive experiments are conducted on SOTA PLL methods and benchmark datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Recently, Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for sequential recommendation. However, existing methods typically retrieve items for each user without any principled mechanism for guaranteeing the reliability of generated recommendations, limiting their trustworthiness. To address this, we introduce SarRec : Statistically-guaranteed Augmented Retrieval for Recommendations, a framework that uses a simple retrieval step to provide relevant context and delivers calibrated, uncertainty-aware predictions with formal statistical guarantees. Specifically, SarRec first constructs the user's context set, utilizing a lightweight differentiable retrieval mechanism for identifying relevant context, and then calibrates the LLM's outputs by adapting the conformal prediction mechanism. We further provide a theoretical analysis that establishes an upper bound on the expected risk of recommendation performance metrics. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets from different domains validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Although Recommender Systems (RS) have been well-developed for various fields of applications, they often suffer from a crisis of platform credibility with respect to RS confidence and fairness, which may drive users away, threatening the platform's long-term success. In recent years, some works have tried to solve these issues; however, they lack strong statistical guarantees. Therefore, there is an urgent need to solve both issues with a unifying framework with robust statistical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel and reliable framework called Equitable and Statistically Unbiased Recommendation (ENSUR)) to dynamically generate prediction sets for users across various groups, which are guaranteed 1) to include ground-truth items with user-predefined high confidence/probability (e.g., 90\%); 2) to ensure user fairness across different groups; 3) to have minimum efficient average prediction set sizes. We further design an efficient algorithm named Guaranteed User Fairness Algorithm (GUFA) to optimize the proposed method and derive upper bounds of risk and fairness metrics to speed up the optimization process. Moreover, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis concerning risk and fairness control and minimum set size. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which aligns with our theoretical analysis.

Although deep partial label learning (deep PLL) classifiers have shown their competitive performance, they are heavily influenced by the noisy false-positive labels leading to poorer performance as the training progresses. Meanwhile, existing deep PLL research lacks theoretical guarantee on the analysis of correlation between label noise (or ambiguity degree) and classification performance. This paper addresses the above limitations with label smoothing (LS) from both theoretical and empirical aspects. In theory, we prove lower and upper bounds of the expected risk to show that label smoothing can help deep PLL. We further derive the optimal smoothing rate to investigate the conditions, i.e., when label smoothing benefits deep PLL. In practice, we design a benchmark solution and a novel optimization algorithm called Label Smoothing-based Partial Label Learning (LS-PLL). Extensive experimental results on benchmark PLL datasets and various deep architectures validate that label smoothing does help deep PLL in improving classification performance and learning distinguishable representations, and the best results can be achieved when the empirical smoothing rate approximately approaches the optimal smoothing rate in theoretical findings. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/kalpiree/LS-PLL.