Cheaper is Better: A Discount-Aware Network for Conversion Rate Prediction in E-commerce Recommendation SystemRuocong Tang, Yang Huang, Xing Fang et al.
Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a crucial element in online recommendation systems, which addresses significant challenges such as data sparsity (DS), sample selection bias (SSB), and delayed feedback. However, the impact of item discount rate-a key factor influencing both pricing and user purchasing behavior, has received limited attention. In this paper, we introduce the Discount-Aware Network (DANet) to model the relationship between item discount rates and CVR. DANet comprises three main components: 1) a time-frequency transformation module that utilizes Fourier transform to derive the frequency spectrum and capture the long-term discount rate trends of items; 2) a distribution de-bias module designed to mitigate the biases in user-specific discount rates caused by various purchase combinations and promotional activities, as well as periodic deviations linked to different promotion periods on e-commerce platforms; and 3) a supervised regression auxiliary task that establishes the explicit item discount labels to enhance the model's performance in terms of value accuracy, facilitating an effective representation of item discount rates. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the superiority of DANet, with offline AUC improving by 1.61%, and online A/B test also shows that DANet achieves impressive gains of 3.63% on pCVR and 2.23% on GMV. DANet has been successfully deployed on Alibaba Tmall APP. The code is available at https://github.com/tangrc/DANet.
3.3IRJul 14
Learning to Forget: Satiation-Aware Long-Sequence Transducers for Mitigating Post-Purchase RedundancyYipin Dai, Ruocong Tang, Xing Fang et al.
Sequential recommendation models predominantly interpret user interactions as positive signals for preference accumulation. However, in e-commerce scenarios, a purchase action often signifies the termination of a specific intent ("Interest Exit") rather than its continuation. Existing models overlook this distinction, suffering from Action-Intent Asymmetry, which leads to severe post-purchase redundancy. In this paper, we propose the Satiation-Aware Mechanism (SAM), an end-to-end framework designed to explicitly model the lifecycle of user interests. SAM incorporates three key components: (1) A Dual-path Cross-Attention architecture that retroactively suppresses historical clicks associated with a fulfilled intent while simultaneously retrieving personalized replenishment rhythms from long-term purchase history; (2) An Adaptive Satiation Gating Unit (ASGU) that generates a time-sensitive soft mask to inhibit satisfied interests immediately after purchase and gradually "re-awaken" them as the predicted repurchase cycle approaches; and (3) A self-supervised Time-to-Next-Purchase (TTNP) auxiliary task to learn latent product lifecycles without manual annotation. Extensive offline experiments on industrial datasets and online A/B testing demonstrate that SAM significantly reduces the Post-Purchase Repeat Rate (PPRR) by over 60%.