Multi-objective Learning to Rank by Model Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Jie, Gao, Huiji, He, Liwei, Katariya, Sanjeev
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Tang, Jie
Gao, Huiji
He, Liwei
Katariya, Sanjeev
author_facet Tang, Jie
Gao, Huiji
He, Liwei
Katariya, Sanjeev
contents In online marketplaces, search ranking's objective is not only to purchase or conversion (primary objective), but to also the purchase outcomes(secondary objectives), e.g. order cancellation(or return), review rating, customer service inquiries, platform long term growth. Multi-objective learning to rank has been widely studied to balance primary and secondary objectives. But traditional approaches in industry face some challenges including expensive parameter tuning leads to sub-optimal solution, suffering from imbalanced data sparsity issue, and being not compatible with ad-hoc objective. In this paper, we propose a distillation-based ranking solution for multi-objective ranking, which optimizes the end-to-end ranking system at Airbnb across multiple ranking models on different objectives along with various considerations to optimize training and serving efficiency to meet industry standards. We found it performs much better than traditional approaches, it doesn't only significantly increases primary objective by a large margin but also meet secondary objectives constraints and improve model stability. We also demonstrated the proposed system could be further simplified by model self-distillation. Besides this, we did additional simulations to show that this approach could also help us efficiently inject ad-hoc non-differentiable business objective into the ranking system while enabling us to balance our optimization objectives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-objective Learning to Rank by Model Distillation
Tang, Jie
Gao, Huiji
He, Liwei
Katariya, Sanjeev
Information Retrieval
In online marketplaces, search ranking's objective is not only to purchase or conversion (primary objective), but to also the purchase outcomes(secondary objectives), e.g. order cancellation(or return), review rating, customer service inquiries, platform long term growth. Multi-objective learning to rank has been widely studied to balance primary and secondary objectives. But traditional approaches in industry face some challenges including expensive parameter tuning leads to sub-optimal solution, suffering from imbalanced data sparsity issue, and being not compatible with ad-hoc objective. In this paper, we propose a distillation-based ranking solution for multi-objective ranking, which optimizes the end-to-end ranking system at Airbnb across multiple ranking models on different objectives along with various considerations to optimize training and serving efficiency to meet industry standards. We found it performs much better than traditional approaches, it doesn't only significantly increases primary objective by a large margin but also meet secondary objectives constraints and improve model stability. We also demonstrated the proposed system could be further simplified by model self-distillation. Besides this, we did additional simulations to show that this approach could also help us efficiently inject ad-hoc non-differentiable business objective into the ranking system while enabling us to balance our optimization objectives.
title Multi-objective Learning to Rank by Model Distillation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07181