Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Channel Fusion in Retrieval for Personalized Recommendations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Junjie, Qin, Jiarui, Lin, Jianghao, Feng, Ziming, Yu, Yong, Zhang, Weinan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Huang, Junjie
Qin, Jiarui
Lin, Jianghao
Feng, Ziming
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
author_facet Huang, Junjie
Qin, Jiarui
Lin, Jianghao
Feng, Ziming
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
contents Recommender systems (RS) are pivotal in managing information overload in modern digital services. A key challenge in RS is efficiently processing vast item pools to deliver highly personalized recommendations under strict latency constraints. Multi-stage cascade ranking addresses this by employing computationally efficient retrieval methods to cover diverse user interests, followed by more precise ranking models to refine the results. In the retrieval stage, multi-channel retrieval is often used to generate distinct item subsets from different candidate generators, leveraging the complementary strengths of these methods to maximize coverage. However, forwarding all retrieved items overwhelms downstream rankers, necessitating truncation. Despite advancements in individual retrieval methods, multi-channel fusion, the process of efficiently merging multi-channel retrieval results, remains underexplored. We are the first to identify and systematically investigate multi-channel fusion in the retrieval stage. Current industry practices often rely on heuristic approaches and manual designs, which often lead to suboptimal performance. Moreover, traditional gradient-based methods like SGD are unsuitable for this task due to the non-differentiable nature of the selection process. In this paper, we explore advanced channel fusion strategies by assigning systematically optimized weights to each channel. We utilize black-box optimization techniques, including the Cross Entropy Method and Bayesian Optimization for global weight optimization, alongside policy gradient-based approaches for personalized merging. Our methods enhance both personalization and flexibility, achieving significant performance improvements across multiple datasets and yielding substantial gains in real-world deployments, offering a scalable solution for optimizing multi-channel fusion in retrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Channel Fusion in Retrieval for Personalized Recommendations
Huang, Junjie
Qin, Jiarui
Lin, Jianghao
Feng, Ziming
Yu, Yong
Zhang, Weinan
Information Retrieval
Recommender systems (RS) are pivotal in managing information overload in modern digital services. A key challenge in RS is efficiently processing vast item pools to deliver highly personalized recommendations under strict latency constraints. Multi-stage cascade ranking addresses this by employing computationally efficient retrieval methods to cover diverse user interests, followed by more precise ranking models to refine the results. In the retrieval stage, multi-channel retrieval is often used to generate distinct item subsets from different candidate generators, leveraging the complementary strengths of these methods to maximize coverage. However, forwarding all retrieved items overwhelms downstream rankers, necessitating truncation. Despite advancements in individual retrieval methods, multi-channel fusion, the process of efficiently merging multi-channel retrieval results, remains underexplored. We are the first to identify and systematically investigate multi-channel fusion in the retrieval stage. Current industry practices often rely on heuristic approaches and manual designs, which often lead to suboptimal performance. Moreover, traditional gradient-based methods like SGD are unsuitable for this task due to the non-differentiable nature of the selection process. In this paper, we explore advanced channel fusion strategies by assigning systematically optimized weights to each channel. We utilize black-box optimization techniques, including the Cross Entropy Method and Bayesian Optimization for global weight optimization, alongside policy gradient-based approaches for personalized merging. Our methods enhance both personalization and flexibility, achieving significant performance improvements across multiple datasets and yielding substantial gains in real-world deployments, offering a scalable solution for optimizing multi-channel fusion in retrieval.
title Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Channel Fusion in Retrieval for Personalized Recommendations
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16080