Why didn't more people see it? Recommendation: Transparency for providers

Abstract

Transparency in recommender systems has been widely studied from the perspective of those receiving recommendations, yet the needs of item providers, the creators whose content is distributed through these platforms, remain largely unexplored. Providers often lack insight into how their items do or do not receive exposure in users' recommendation lists. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a surrogate modeling approach to explain item exposure at a system level. Rather than explaining individual user-item pairs, we train a proxy model to approximate the exposure distribution produced by a recommender. By quantifying the contribution of each feature, we seek to explain the factors driving the recommendation model's decisions across the entire user base. We evaluate our approach on two datasets and three recommendation models. Results show that the surrogate model captures the global behavior of all three recommenders with high fidelity and that the most influential factors vary meaningfully across models and domains.