Multi-channel Integrated Recommendation with Exposure Constraints

Integrated recommendation, which aims at jointly recommending heterogeneous items from different channels in a main feed, has been widely applied to various online platforms. Though attractive, integrated recommendation requires the ranking methods to migrate from conventional user-item models to the new user-channel-item paradigm in order to better capture users' preferences on both item and channel levels. Moreover, practical feed recommendation systems usually impose exposure constraints on different channels to ensure user experience. This leads to greater difficulty in the joint ranking of heterogeneous items. In this paper, we investigate the integrated recommendation task with exposure constraints in practical recommender systems. Our contribution is forth-fold. First, we formulate this task as a binary online linear programming problem and propose a two-layer framework named Multi-channel Integrated Recommendation with Exposure Constraints (MIREC) to obtain the optimal solution. Second, we propose an efficient online allocation algorithm to determine the optimal exposure assignment of different channels from a global view of all user requests over the entire time horizon. We prove that this algorithm reaches the optimal point under a regret bound of $ \mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T}) $ with linear complexity. Third, we propose a series of collaborative models to determine the optimal layout of heterogeneous items at each user request. The joint modeling of user interests, cross-channel correlation, and page context in our models aligns more with the browsing nature of feed products than existing models. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both offline datasets and online A/B tests to verify the effectiveness of MIREC. The proposed framework has now been implemented on the homepage of Taobao to serve the main traffic.

Multi-factor Sequential Re-ranking with Perception-Aware Diversification

Feed recommendation systems, which recommend a sequence of items for users to browse and interact with, have gained significant popularity in practical applications. In feed products, users tend to browse a large number of items in succession, so the previously viewed items have a significant impact on users' behavior towards the following items. Therefore, traditional methods that mainly focus on improving the accuracy of recommended items are suboptimal for feed recommendations because they may recommend highly similar items. For feed recommendation, it is crucial to consider both the accuracy and diversity of the recommended item sequences in order to satisfy users' evolving interest when consecutively viewing items. To this end, this work proposes a general re-ranking framework named Multi-factor Sequential Re-ranking with Perception-Aware Diversification (MPAD) to jointly optimize accuracy and diversity for feed recommendation in a sequential manner. Specifically, MPAD first extracts users' different scales of interests from their behavior sequences through graph clustering-based aggregations. Then, MPAD proposes two sub-models to respectively evaluate the accuracy and diversity of a given item by capturing users' evolving interest due to the ever-changing context and users' personal perception of diversity from an item sequence perspective. This is consistent with the browsing nature of the feed scenario. Finally, MPAD generates the return list by sequentially selecting optimal items from the candidate set to maximize the joint benefits of accuracy and diversity of the entire list. MPAD has been implemented in Taobao's homepage feed to serve the main traffic and provide services to recommend billions of items to hundreds of millions of users every day.

Learning Transferrable Parameters for Long-tailed Sequential User Behavior Modeling

Sequential user behavior modeling plays a crucial role in online user-oriented services, such as product purchasing, news feed consumption, and online advertising. The performance of sequential modeling heavily depends on the scale and quality of historical behaviors. However, the number of user behaviors inherently follows a long-tailed distribution, which has been seldom explored. In this work, we argue that focusing on tail users could bring more benefits and address the long tails issue by learning transferrable parameters from both optimization and feature perspectives. Specifically, we propose a gradient alignment optimizer and adopt an adversarial training scheme to facilitate knowledge transfer from the head to the tail. Such methods can also deal with the cold-start problem of new users. Moreover, it could be directly adaptive to various well-established sequential models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets verify the superiority of our framework compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.