Denisa Roberts

Alaa Awad, Denisa Roberts, Eden Dolev et al.

In this article, we present a general approach to personalizing ads through encoding and learning from variable-length sequences of recent user actions and diverse representations. To this end we introduce a three-component module called the adSformer diversifiable personalization module (ADPM) that learns a dynamic user representation. We illustrate the module's effectiveness and flexibility by personalizing the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Post-Click Conversion Rate (PCCVR) models used in sponsored search. The first component of the ADPM, the adSformer encoder, includes a novel adSformer block which learns the most salient sequence signals. ADPM's second component enriches the learned signal through visual, multimodal, and other pretrained representations. Lastly, the third ADPM "learned on the fly" component further diversifies the signal encoded in the dynamic user representation. The ADPM-personalized CTR and PCCVR models, henceforth referred to as adSformer CTR and adSformer PCCVR, outperform the CTR and PCCVR production baselines by $+2.66\%$ and $+2.42\%$, respectively, in offline Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC-AUC). Following the robust online gains in A/B tests, Etsy Ads deployed the ADPM-personalized sponsored search system to $100\%$ of traffic as of February 2023.

Eden Dolev, Alaa Awad, Denisa Roberts et al.

Efficiently learning visual representations of items is vital for large-scale recommendations. In this article we compare several pretrained efficient backbone architectures, both in the convolutional neural network (CNN) and in the vision transformer (ViT) family. We describe challenges in e-commerce vision applications at scale and highlight methods to efficiently train, evaluate, and serve visual representations. We present ablation studies evaluating visual representations in several downstream tasks. To this end, we present a novel multilingual text-to-image generative offline evaluation method for visually similar recommendation systems. Finally, we include online results from deployed machine learning systems in production on a large scale e-commerce platform.

Denisa A. O. Roberts

This article investigates multilingual evidence retrieval and fact verification as a step to combat global disinformation, a first effort of this kind, to the best of our knowledge. The goal is building multilingual systems that retrieve in evidence-rich languages to verify claims in evidence-poor languages that are more commonly targeted by disinformation. To this end, our EnmBERT fact verification system shows evidence of transfer learning ability and 400 example mixed English-Romanian dataset is made available for cross-lingual transfer learning evaluation.

Denisa A. O. Roberts, Lucas R. Roberts

This article presents matrix backpropagation algorithms for the QR decomposition of matrices $A_{m, n}$, that are either square (m = n), wide (m < n), or deep (m > n), with rank $k = min(m, n)$. Furthermore, we derive novel matrix backpropagation results for the pivoted (full-rank) QR decomposition and for the LQ decomposition of deep input matrices. Differentiable QR decomposition offers a numerically stable, computationally efficient method to solve least squares problems frequently encountered in machine learning and computer vision. Other use cases such as graph learning and network compression are listed in the article. Software implementation across popular deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, MXNet) incorporate the methods for general use within the deep learning community. Furthermore, this article aids the practitioner in understanding the matrix backpropagation methodology as part of larger computational graphs.

Denisa Roberts

In this article the Lorenz dynamical system is revived and revisited and the current state of the art results for one step ahead forecasting for the Lorenz trajectories are published. Multitask learning is shown to help learning the hard to learn z trajectory. The article is a reflection upon the evolution of neural networks with respect to the prediction performance on this canonical task.