Liqin Zhao

Xiang-Rong Sheng, Liqin Zhao, Guorui Zhou et al.

Traditional industrial recommenders are usually trained on a single business domain and then serve for this domain. However, in large commercial platforms, it is often the case that the recommenders need to make click-through rate (CTR) predictions for multiple business domains. Different domains have overlapping user groups and items. Thus, there exist commonalities. Since the specific user groups have disparity and the user behaviors may change in various business domains, there also have distinctions. The distinctions result in domain-specific data distributions, making it hard for a single shared model to work well on all domains. To learn an effective and efficient CTR model to handle multiple domains simultaneously, we present Star Topology Adaptive Recommender (STAR). Concretely, STAR has the star topology, which consists of the shared centered parameters and domain-specific parameters. The shared parameters are applied to learn commonalities of all domains, and the domain-specific parameters capture domain distinction for more refined prediction. Given requests from different business domains, STAR can adapt its parameters conditioned on the domain characteristics. The experimental result from production data validates the superiority of the proposed STAR model. Since 2020, STAR has been deployed in the display advertising system of Alibaba, obtaining averaging 8.0% improvement on CTR and 6.0% on RPM (Revenue Per Mille).

Zhe Wang, Liqin Zhao, Biye Jiang et al.

Multi-stage cascade architecture exists widely in many industrial systems such as recommender systems and online advertising, which often consists of sequential modules including matching, pre-ranking, ranking, etc. For a long time, it is believed pre-ranking is just a simplified version of the ranking module, considering the larger size of the candidate set to be ranked. Thus, efforts are made mostly on simplifying ranking model to handle the explosion of computing power for online inference. In this paper, we rethink the challenge of the pre-ranking system from an algorithm-system co-design view. Instead of saving computing power with restriction of model architecture which causes loss of model performance, here we design a new pre-ranking system by joint optimization of both the pre-ranking model and the computing power it costs. We name it COLD (Computing power cost-aware Online and Lightweight Deep pre-ranking system). COLD beats SOTA in three folds: (i) an arbitrary deep model with cross features can be applied in COLD under a constraint of controllable computing power cost. (ii) computing power cost is explicitly reduced by applying optimization tricks for inference acceleration. This further brings space for COLD to apply more complex deep models to reach better performance. (iii) COLD model works in an online learning and severing manner, bringing it excellent ability to handle the challenge of the data distribution shift. Meanwhile, the fully online pre-ranking system of COLD provides us with a flexible infrastructure that supports efficient new model developing and online A/B testing.Since 2019, COLD has been deployed in almost all products involving the pre-ranking module in the display advertising system in Alibaba, bringing significant improvements.

Xiao Ma, Liqin Zhao, Guan Huang et al.

Estimating post-click conversion rate (CVR) accurately is crucial for ranking systems in industrial applications such as recommendation and advertising. Conventional CVR modeling applies popular deep learning methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. However it encounters several task-specific problems in practice, making CVR modeling challenging. For example, conventional CVR models are trained with samples of clicked impressions while utilized to make inference on the entire space with samples of all impressions. This causes a sample selection bias problem. Besides, there exists an extreme data sparsity problem, making the model fitting rather difficult. In this paper, we model CVR in a brand-new perspective by making good use of sequential pattern of user actions, i.e., impression -> click -> conversion. The proposed Entire Space Multi-task Model (ESMM) can eliminate the two problems simultaneously by i) modeling CVR directly over the entire space, ii) employing a feature representation transfer learning strategy. Experiments on dataset gathered from Taobao's recommender system demonstrate that ESMM significantly outperforms competitive methods. We also release a sampling version of this dataset to enable future research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public dataset which contains samples with sequential dependence of click and conversion labels for CVR modeling.

Tiezheng Ge, Liqin Zhao, Guorui Zhou et al.

In Taobao, the largest e-commerce platform in China, billions of items are provided and typically displayed with their images. For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction in online advertising system exploits abundant user historical behaviors to identify whether a user is interested in a candidate ad. Enhancing behavior representations with user behavior images will help understand user's visual preference and improve the accuracy of CTR prediction greatly. So we propose to model user preference jointly with user behavior ID features and behavior images. However, training with user behavior images brings tens to hundreds of images in one sample, giving rise to a great challenge in both communication and computation. To handle these challenges, we propose a novel and efficient distributed machine learning paradigm called Advanced Model Server (AMS). With the well known Parameter Server (PS) framework, each server node handles a separate part of parameters and updates them independently. AMS goes beyond this and is designed to be capable of learning a unified image descriptor model shared by all server nodes which embeds large images into low dimensional high level features before transmitting images to worker nodes. AMS thus dramatically reduces the communication load and enables the arduous joint training process. Based on AMS, the methods of effectively combining the images and ID features are carefully studied, and then we propose a Deep Image CTR Model. Our approach is shown to achieve significant improvements in both online and offline evaluations, and has been deployed in Taobao display advertising system serving the main traffic.