Qinglei Wang

Ruifeng Zhang, Zexi Huang, Zikai Wang et al.

Accurately capturing feature interactions is essential in recommender systems, and recent trends show that scaling up model capacity could be a key driver for next-level predictive performance. While prior work has explored various model architectures to capture multi-granularity feature interactions, relatively little attention has been paid to efficient feature handling and scaling model capacity without incurring excessive inference latency. In this paper, we address this by presenting Zenith, a scalable and efficient ranking architecture that learns complex feature interactions with minimal runtime overhead. Zenith is designed to handle a few high-dimensional Prime Tokens with Token Fusion and Token Boost modules, which exhibits superior scaling laws compared to other state-of-the-art ranking methods, thanks to its improved token heterogeneity. Its real-world effectiveness is demonstrated by deploying the architecture to TikTok Live, a leading online livestreaming platform that attracts billions of users globally. Our A/B test shows that Zenith achieves +1.05%/-1.10% in online CTR AUC and Logloss, and realizes +9.93% gains in Quality Watch Session / User and +8.11% in Quality Watch Duration / User.

Renqin Cai, Qinglei Wang, Chong Wang et al.

Sequential recommendation recommends items based on sequences of users' historical actions. The key challenge in it is how to effectively model the influence from distant actions to the action to be predicted, i.e., recognizing the long-term dependence structure; and it remains an underexplored problem. To better model the long-term dependence structure, we propose a GatedLongRec solution in this work. To account for the long-term dependence, GatedLongRec extracts distant actions of top-$k$ related categories to the user's ongoing intent with a top-$k$ gating network, and utilizes a long-term encoder to encode the transition patterns among these identified actions. As user intent is not directly observable, we take advantage of available side-information about the actions, i.e., the category of their associated items, to infer the intents. End-to-end training is performed to estimate the intent representation and predict the next action for sequential recommendation. Extensive experiments on two large datasets show that the proposed solution can recognize the structure of long-term dependence, thus greatly improving the sequential recommendation.