Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework for Recommendation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yan, YaChen, Li, Liubo, Choudhary, Ravi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yan, YaChen
Li, Liubo
Choudhary, Ravi
author_facet Yan, YaChen
Li, Liubo
Choudhary, Ravi
contents In modern recommender systems, CTR/CVR models are increasingly trained with ranking objectives to improve item ranking quality. While this shift aligns training more closely with serving goals, most existing methods rely on in-batch negative sampling, which predominantly surfaces easy negatives. This limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained user preferences and weakens overall ranking performance. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework with two key components. First, we apply residual vector quantization to user embeddings to generate hierarchical user codes that partition users into hierarchical, trie-structured clusters. Second, we apply listwise ranking losses to user-item pairs at each level of the hierarchy, where shallow levels group loosely similar users and deeper levels group highly similar users, reinforcing learning-to-rank signals through progressively harder negatives. Since users with similar preferences and content exposure tend to yield more informative negatives, applying ranking losses within these hierarchical user groups serves as an effective approximation of hard negative mining. Our approach improves ranking performance without requiring complex real-time context collection or retrieval infrastructure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently enhances both model calibration and ranking accuracy, offering a scalable and practical solution for industrial recommender systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12756
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework for Recommendation Models
Yan, YaChen
Li, Liubo
Choudhary, Ravi
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
In modern recommender systems, CTR/CVR models are increasingly trained with ranking objectives to improve item ranking quality. While this shift aligns training more closely with serving goals, most existing methods rely on in-batch negative sampling, which predominantly surfaces easy negatives. This limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained user preferences and weakens overall ranking performance. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework with two key components. First, we apply residual vector quantization to user embeddings to generate hierarchical user codes that partition users into hierarchical, trie-structured clusters. Second, we apply listwise ranking losses to user-item pairs at each level of the hierarchy, where shallow levels group loosely similar users and deeper levels group highly similar users, reinforcing learning-to-rank signals through progressively harder negatives. Since users with similar preferences and content exposure tend to yield more informative negatives, applying ranking losses within these hierarchical user groups serves as an effective approximation of hard negative mining. Our approach improves ranking performance without requiring complex real-time context collection or retrieval infrastructure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently enhances both model calibration and ranking accuracy, offering a scalable and practical solution for industrial recommender systems.
title Hierarchical Group-wise Ranking Framework for Recommendation Models
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12756