Short-Form Video Recommendations with Multimodal Embeddings: Addressing Cold-Start and Bias Challenges

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dzhoha, Andrii, Mirylenka, Katya, Malykh, Egor, Buchmann, Marco-Andrea, Catino, Francesca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dzhoha, Andrii
Mirylenka, Katya
Malykh, Egor
Buchmann, Marco-Andrea
Catino, Francesca
author_facet Dzhoha, Andrii
Mirylenka, Katya
Malykh, Egor
Buchmann, Marco-Andrea
Catino, Francesca
contents In recent years, social media users have spent significant amounts of time on short-form video platforms. As a result, established platforms in other domains, such as e-commerce, have begun introducing short-form video content to engage users and increase their time spent on the platform. The success of these experiences is due not only to the content itself but also to a unique UI innovation: instead of offering users a list of choices to click, platforms actively recommend content for users to watch one at a time. This creates new challenges for recommender systems, especially when launching a new video experience. Beyond the limited interaction data, immersive feed experiences introduce stronger position bias due to the UI and duration bias when optimizing for watch-time, as models tend to favor shorter videos. These issues, together with the feedback loop inherent in recommender systems, make it difficult to build effective solutions. In this paper, we highlight the challenges faced when introducing a new short-form video experience and present our experience showing that, even with sufficient video interaction data, it can be more beneficial to leverage a video retrieval system using a fine-tuned multimodal vision-language model to overcome these challenges. This approach demonstrated greater effectiveness compared to conventional supervised learning methods in online experiments conducted on our e-commerce platform.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19346
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Short-Form Video Recommendations with Multimodal Embeddings: Addressing Cold-Start and Bias Challenges
Dzhoha, Andrii
Mirylenka, Katya
Malykh, Egor
Buchmann, Marco-Andrea
Catino, Francesca
Machine Learning
In recent years, social media users have spent significant amounts of time on short-form video platforms. As a result, established platforms in other domains, such as e-commerce, have begun introducing short-form video content to engage users and increase their time spent on the platform. The success of these experiences is due not only to the content itself but also to a unique UI innovation: instead of offering users a list of choices to click, platforms actively recommend content for users to watch one at a time. This creates new challenges for recommender systems, especially when launching a new video experience. Beyond the limited interaction data, immersive feed experiences introduce stronger position bias due to the UI and duration bias when optimizing for watch-time, as models tend to favor shorter videos. These issues, together with the feedback loop inherent in recommender systems, make it difficult to build effective solutions. In this paper, we highlight the challenges faced when introducing a new short-form video experience and present our experience showing that, even with sufficient video interaction data, it can be more beneficial to leverage a video retrieval system using a fine-tuned multimodal vision-language model to overcome these challenges. This approach demonstrated greater effectiveness compared to conventional supervised learning methods in online experiments conducted on our e-commerce platform.
title Short-Form Video Recommendations with Multimodal Embeddings: Addressing Cold-Start and Bias Challenges
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19346