Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework for Recommendation Models

In modern recommender systems, CTR/CVR models are increasingly trained with ranking objectives to improve item ranking quality. While this shift aligns training more closely with serving goals, most existing methods rely on in-batch negative sampling, which predominantly surfaces easy negatives. This limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained user preferences and weakens overall ranking performance. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework with two key components. First, we apply residual vector quantization to user embeddings to generate hierarchical user codes that partition users into hierarchical, trie-structured clusters. Second, we apply listwise ranking losses to user-item pairs at each level of the hierarchy, where shallow levels group loosely similar users and deeper levels group highly similar users, reinforcing learning-to-rank signals through progressively harder negatives. Since users with similar preferences and content exposure tend to yield more informative negatives, applying ranking losses within these hierarchical user groups serves as an effective approximation of hard negative mining. Our approach improves ranking performance without requiring complex real-time context collection or retrieval infrastructure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently enhances both model calibration and ranking accuracy, offering a scalable and practical solution for industrial recommender systems.

Activity report analysis with automatic single or multispan answer extraction

In the era of loT (Internet of Things) we are surrounded by a plethora of Al enabled devices that can transcribe images, video, audio, and sensors signals into text descriptions. When such transcriptions are captured in activity reports for monitoring, life logging and anomaly detection applications, a user would typically request a summary or ask targeted questions about certain sections of the report they are interested in. Depending on the context and the type of question asked, a question answering (QA) system would need to automatically determine whether the answer covers single-span or multi-span text components. Currently available QA datasets primarily focus on single span responses only (such as SQuAD[4]) or contain a low proportion of examples with multiple span answers (such as DROP[3]). To investigate automatic selection of single/multi-span answers in the use case described, we created a new smart home environment dataset comprised of questions paired with single-span or multi-span answers depending on the question and context queried. In addition, we propose a RoBERTa[6]-based multiple span extraction question answering (MSEQA) model returning the appropriate answer span for a given question. Our experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art QA models on our dataset while providing comparable performance on published individual single/multi-span task datasets.