LO-FAR: A Cost-Aware Local Filter for Sparse Feature Ranking in Industrial Ad Recommendation

Industrial ad recommendation models rely heavily on sparse, high-cardinality ID-list features that encode user histories and contextual identifiers. Each is backed by a dedicated embedding table, so these features dominate storage, training, and serving cost and must be revisited as traffic and downstream models evolve. Therefore, sparse feature ranking is not just an offline modeling problem but also a recurrent systems decision limited by compute budgets and iteration cadence. We present Localized Feature Ranking (LO-FAR), a CPU-only, model-agnostic workflow that ranks each candidate feature from its stand-alone held-out predictive signal using lightweight local estimators rather than the GPU-bound retraining loops of permutation- and stochastic-gate-based methods. On a production dataset of more than one million logged interactions and 475 sparse ID-list features, LO-FAR completes ranking in approximately two CPU-hours and preserves downstream Normalized Entropy gains on CTR and CVR tasks that are competitive with shuffle-based importance, Binary Stochastic Neurons, and a coverage-based heuristic across budgets of 100--400 retained features. The contribution is a deployable workflow showing that, when cost and turnaround constraints are binding, a simple local filter can be a practical production choice over heavier interaction-aware alternatives.

COFFEE: COdesign Framework for Feature Enriched Embeddings in Ads-Ranking Systems

Diverse and enriched data sources are essential for commercial ads-recommendation models to accurately assess user interest both before and after engagement with content. While extended user-engagement histories can improve the prediction of user interests, it is equally important to embed activity sequences from multiple sources to ensure freshness of user and ad-representations, following scaling law principles. In this paper, we present a novel three-dimensional framework for enhancing user-ad representations without increasing model inference or serving complexity. The first dimension examines the impact of incorporating diverse event sources, the second considers the benefits of longer user histories, and the third focuses on enriching data with additional event attributes and multi-modal embeddings. We assess the return on investment (ROI) of our source enrichment framework by comparing organic user engagement sources, such as content viewing, with ad-impression sources. The proposed method can boost the area under curve (AUC) and the slope of scaling curves for ad-impression sources by 1.56 to 2 times compared to organic usage sources even for short online-sequence lengths of 100 to 10K. Additionally, click-through rate (CTR) prediction improves by 0.56% AUC over the baseline production ad-recommendation system when using enriched ad-impression event sources, leading to improved sequence scaling resolutions for longer and offline user-ad representations.