You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control (Extended Abstract)

De Toni, Giovanni; Purificato, Erasmo; Gómez, Emilia; Passerini, Andrea; Lepri, Bruno; Consonni, Cristian

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2026/923

You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control (Extended Abstract)

Giovanni De Toni, Erasmo Purificato, Emilia Gómez, Andrea Passerini, Bruno Lepri, Cristian Consonni

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Sister Conferences Best Papers. Pages 8260-8265.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/923

Keywords

AI: Uncertainty in AI
Data Mining: Recommender systems
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairnes: Societal impact of AI
AI: Machine Learning

Abstract

Recommenders are significantly shaping online information consumption. While effective at personalizing content, these systems increasingly face criticism for propagating irrelevant, unwanted, and even harmful recommendations. Such content degrades user satisfaction and contributes to significant societal issues, including misinformation, radicalization, and erosion of user trust. Although platforms offer mechanisms to mitigate exposure to undesired content, these mechanisms are often insufficiently effective and slow to adapt to users' feedback. This paper introduces an intuitive, model-agnostic, and distribution-free method that uses conformal risk control to provably bound unwanted content in personalized recommendations by leveraging simple binary feedback on items. We also address a limitation of traditional conformal risk control approaches, i.e., the fact that the recommender can provide a smaller set of recommended items, by leveraging implicit feedback on consumed items to expand the recommendation set while ensuring robust risk mitigation. Our experimental evaluation on data coming from a popular online video-sharing platform demonstrates that our approach ensures an effective and controllable reduction of unwanted recommendations with minimal effort.

Giovanni De Toni, Erasmo Purificato, Emilia Gómez, Andrea Passerini, Bruno Lepri, and Cristian Consonni. 2026. You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control (Extended Abstract). In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26. IJCAI, 8260–8265. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/923

@inproceedings{ijcai2026p923,
  title     = {You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control (Extended Abstract)},
  author    = {De Toni, Giovanni and Purificato, Erasmo and Gómez, Emilia and Passerini, Andrea and Lepri, Bruno and Consonni, Cristian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-26}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {Diego Calvanese},
  pages     = {8260--8265},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Sister Conferences Best Papers},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2026/923},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/923},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control (Extended Abstract)
AU  - De Toni, Giovanni
AU  - Purificato, Erasmo
AU  - Gómez, Emilia
AU  - Passerini, Andrea
AU  - Lepri, Bruno
AU  - Consonni, Cristian
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2026
SP  - 8260
EP  - 8265
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2026/923
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/923
ER  -