Jiacong He

2papers

2 Papers

15.7IRMay 8
A Production-Ready RL Framework for Personalized Utility Tuning with Pareto Sweeping in Pinterest Recommender Systems

Yichu Zhou, Mehdi Ben Ayed, Lin Yang et al.

Large-scale recommenders encode multi-objective trade-offs by combining multiple predicted outcomes into a single utility score. Although this utility layer can be updated independently of the ranker, weight tuning remains largely manual, globally applied, slow to adapt to changing environments and business needs, and hard to govern as priorities shift. We propose PRL-PUTS, a Production-ready, ranker independent RL framework for Personalized Utility-weight Tuning with Pareto Sweeping. We cast utility tuning as a one-step, value-based RL problem: given request context, an agent selects a utility-weight vector that re-weights ranker predictions to maximize request-level engagement rewards. To visualize performance across the trade-off spectrum and allow decision makers to update the deployed operating policy instantly, we adopt an inference-time Pareto frontier sweeping via a scalarization parameter, producing a family of policies and an empirical Pareto frontier used as a governance artifact for operating policy selection. PRL-PUTS runs in parallel with ranking inference without adding serving latency. We validate PRL-PUTS with offline analysis using unbiased exploration logs and online experiments on Pinterest Homefeed where PRL-PUTS showed significant increases in engagement compared to baseline such as +0.13\% increase in successful session, a core metric for user engagement.

CLMay 7, 2020
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences

Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou et al.

We present a new problem: grounding natural language instructions to mobile user interface actions, and create three new datasets for it. For full task evaluation, we create PIXELHELP, a corpus that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. To scale training, we decouple the language and action data by (a) annotating action phrase spans in HowTo instructions and (b) synthesizing grounded descriptions of actions for mobile user interfaces. We use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instructions. A grounding Transformer then contextually represents UI objects using both their content and screen position and connects them to object descriptions. Given a starting screen and instruction, our model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PIXELHELP.