Liyao Lu

Dingsu Wang, Filip Ryzner, Kelly He et al.

As recommender systems mature in the past few years, their optimization objectives have evolved from a primary focusing on short-term behavioral signals to a broader emphasis on long-term user engagement and retention. However, directly optimizing retention is difficult because return signals are sparse, delayed, and only partially attributable to earlier recommendations. Prior work has addressed this challenge with sequential modeling and reinforcement learning, but these approaches typically require task specific reward engineering, substantial computational overhead, and surface specific implementations that are difficult to generalize. In this paper, we present a unified, model-agnostic downstream reward framework for optimizing long-term user value in large-scale recommendation systems. First, we formulate the downstream reward learning problem and develop an offline screening framework to identify session level behaviors that are both observable early and predictive of future retention. We then propose several model-agnostic downstream rewards signals derived from observed user action patterns across multiple sources. We further discuss the engineering effort to productionize the proposed rewards derivations and challenges we faced when adding them to our ranking models. Online A/B experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in engagement and retention-related metrics, and the framework has been deployed across multiple Pinterest surfaces, including Homefeed, Related Pins, Search, and Notifications.

Liyao Lu

Security inspection is the first line of defense to ensure the safety of people's lives and property, and intelligent security inspection is an inevitable trend in the future development of the security inspection industry. Aiming at the problems of overlapping detection objects, false detection of contraband, and missed detection in the process of X-ray image detection, an improved X-ray contraband detection algorithm CSS-YOLO based on YOLOv8s is proposed.

Liyao Lu, Qiang Lyu

It is not surprise for machine learning models to provide decent prediction accuracy of soccer games outcomes based on various objective metrics. However, the performance is not that decent in terms of predicting difficult and valuable matches. A deep learning model is designed and trained on a real sequential trading data from the real prediction market, with the assumption that such trading data contain critical latent information to determine the game outcomes. A new loss function is proposed which biases the selection toward matches with high investment return to train our model. Full investigation of 4669 top soccer league matches showed that our model traded off prediction accuracy for high value return due to a certain ability to detect dark horses. A further try is conducted to depict some indicators discovered by our model for describing key features of big dark horses and regular hot horses.