Progressive Learning with Human Feedback for Personalized Adaptive Video Streaming

Existing quality of experience (QoE)-driven adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms either fail to consider personalized QoE or rely on over-simplified QoE models, all resulting in unsatisfactory streaming experiences. Recognizing the wide existence of user feedback schemes in existing streaming applications, we introduce Q+, a framework leveraging progressively gathered personal user opinion scores from multiple interaction sessions for enhanced user-system alignment. Q+ first innovates QoE modeling by incorporating both pairwise ordinal and cardinal preferences constructed from scores. The capturing of both preferences ensures reliable and robust preference representation. Moreover, we design a monotonic neural network as the QoE model to capture the inherent monotonicity property in ABR services, improving model expressivity and generalization ability even with limited human feedback. To align the policy with the progressively updated QoE, we then develop a value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for bitrate control that integrates reward relabeling and calibrated prioritized experience replay. Extensive experiments reveal that Q+ consistently surpasses state-of-the-art rule-based, control-based, and RL-based baselines within only three sessions, improving QoE by 5.69% to 29.39% across diverse network conditions.