To cater to users' desire for an immersive browsing experience, numerous e-commerce platforms provide various recommendation scenarios, with a focus on Trigger-Induced Recommendation (TIR) tasks. However, the majority of current TIR methods heavily rely on the trigger item to understand user intent, lacking a higher-level exploration and exploitation of user intent (e.g., popular items and complementary items), which may result in an overly convergent understanding of users' short-term intent and can be detrimental to users' long-term purchasing experiences. Moreover, users' short-term intent shows uncertainty and is affected by various factors such as browsing context and historical behaviors, which poses challenges to user intent modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model called Deep Uncertainty Intent Network (DUIN), comprising three essential modules: i) Explicit Intent Exploit Module extracting explicit user intent using the contrastive learning paradigm; ii) Latent Intent Explore Module exploring latent user intent by leveraging the multi-view relationships between items; iii) Intent Uncertainty Measurement Module offering a distributional estimation and capturing the uncertainty associated with user intent. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of DUIN compared to existing baselines. Notably, DUIN has been deployed across all TIR scenarios in our e-commerce platform, with online A/B testing results conclusively validating its superiority.

The shopping query suggestion offers personalized queries to users and plays a crucial role in search engines. However, existing shopping query suggestion methods suffer from poor task generalization and limited semantic comprehension problems. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the shopping query suggestion that effectively addresses the shortcomings of existing approaches. Our proposed framework leverages a generative language model and fine-grained preference alignment to enhance semantic comprehension and improve the quality of generated queries. Our key contributions include the introduction of a personalized prompt set for diverse query suggestion tasks, the integration of interaction behavior time to capture user query interests, and the utilization of reinforcement learning techniques to align user preferences. Experimental results demonstrate enhancements in different scenarios. Our codes are available at https://github.com/1170300319/CIKM2024_SOUP.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks in the industry, especially in e-commerce, social media, and streaming media. It directly impacts website revenues, user satisfaction, and user retention. However, real-world production platforms often encompass various domains to cater for diverse customer needs. Traditional CTR prediction models struggle in multi-domain recommendation scenarios, facing challenges of data sparsity and disparate data distributions across domains. Existing multi-domain recommendation approaches introduce specific-domain modules for each domain, which partially address these issues but often significantly increase model parameters and lead to insufficient training. In this paper, we propose a Multi-domain Low-Rank Adaptive network (MLoRA) for CTR prediction, where we introduce a specialized LoRA module for each domain. This approach enhances the model’s performance in multi-domain CTR prediction tasks and is able to be applied to various deep-learning models. We evaluate the proposed method on several multi-domain datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our MLoRA approach achieves a significant improvement compared with state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we deploy it in the production environment of the Alibaba.COM 1. The online A/B testing results indicate the superiority and flexibility in real-world production environments. The code of our MLoRA is publicly available 2.

The recommendation has been playing a key role in many industries, e.g., e-commerce, streaming media, social media, etc. Recently, a new recommendation scenario, called Trigger-Induced Recommendation (TIR), where users are able to explicitly express their instant interests via trigger items, is emerging as an essential role in many e-commerce platforms, e.g., Alibaba.com and Amazon. Without explicitly modeling the user's instant interest, traditional recommendation methods usually obtain sub-optimal results in TIR. Even though there are a few methods considering the trigger and target items simultaneously to solve this problem, they still haven't taken into account temporal information of user behaviors, the dynamic change of user instant interest when the user scrolls down and the interactions between the trigger and target items. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel method -- Deep Evolutional Instant Interest Network (DEI2N), for click-through rate prediction in TIR scenarios. Specifically, we design a User Instant Interest Modeling Layer to predict the dynamic change of the intensity of instant interest when the user scrolls down. Temporal information is utilized in user behavior modeling. Moreover, an Interaction Layer is introduced to learn better interactions between the trigger and target items. We evaluate our method on several offline and real-world industrial datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed DEI2N outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, online A/B testing demonstrates the superiority over the existing baseline in real-world production environments.

We present a new encoder-decoder generative network dubbed EdgeNet, which introduces a novel encoder-decoder framework for data-driven auction design in online e-commerce advertising. We break the neural auction paradigm of Generalized-Second-Price(GSP), and improve the utilization efficiency of data while ensuring the economic characteristics of the auction mechanism. Specifically, EdgeNet introduces a transformer-based encoder to better capture the mutual influence among different candidate advertisements. In contrast to GSP based neural auction model, we design an autoregressive decoder to better utilize the rich context information in online advertising auctions. EdgeNet is conceptually simple and easy to extend to the existing end-to-end neural auction framework. We validate the efficiency of EdgeNet on a wide range of e-commercial advertising auction, demonstrating its potential in improving user experience and platform revenue.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the core tasks in industrial applications such as online advertising and recommender systems. However, the performance of existing CTR models is hampered by the cold-start users who have very few historical behavior data, given that these models often rely on enough sequential behavior data to learn the embedding vectors. In this paper, we propose a novel framework dubbed GF2 to alleviate the cold-start problem in deep learning based CTR prediction. GF2 augments the embeddings of cold-start users after the embedding layer in the deep CTR model based on the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and the obtained generator by GAN can be further fine-tuned locally to enhance the CTR prediction in cold-start settings. GF2 is general for deep CTR models that use embeddings to model the features of users, and it has already been deployed in real-world online display advertising system. Experimental results on two large-scale real-world datasets show that GF2 can significantly improve the prediction performance over three polular deep CTR models.

The remarkable progress of network embedding has led to state-of-the-art algorithms in recommendation. However, the sparsity of user-item interactions (i.e., explicit preferences) on websites remains a big challenge for predicting users' behaviors. Although research efforts have been made in utilizing some auxiliary information (e.g., social relations between users) to solve the problem, the existing rich heterogeneous auxiliary relationships are still not fully exploited. Moreover, previous works relied on linearly combined regularizers and suffered parameter tuning. In this work, we collect abundant relationships from common user behaviors and item information, and propose a novel framework named IntentGC to leverage both explicit preferences and heterogeneous relationships by graph convolutional networks. In addition to the capability of modeling heterogeneity, IntentGC can learn the importance of different relationships automatically by the neural model in a nonlinear sense. To apply IntentGC to web-scale applications, we design a faster graph convolutional model named IntentNet by avoiding unnecessary feature interactions. Empirical experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets and online A/B tests in Alibaba demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art algorithms. We also release the source code of our work at https://github.com/peter14121/intentgc-models.

We study a novel problem of sponsored search (SS) for E-Commerce platforms: how we can attract query users to click product advertisements (ads) by presenting them features of products that attract them. This not only benefits merchants and the platform, but also improves user experience. The problem is challenging due to the following reasons: (1) We need to carefully manipulate the ad content without affecting user search experience. (2) It is difficult to obtain users' explicit feedback of their preference in product features. (3) Nowadays, a great portion of the search traffic in E-Commerce platforms is from their mobile apps (e.g., nearly 90% in Taobao). The situation would get worse in the mobile setting due to limited space. We are focused on the mobile setting and propose to manipulate ad titles by adding a few selling point keywords (SPs) to attract query users. We model it as a personalized attractive SP prediction problem and carry out both large-scale offline evaluation and online A/B tests in Taobao. The contributions include: (1) We explore various exhibition schemes of SPs. (2) We propose a surrogate of user explicit feedback for SP preference. (3) We also explore multi-task learning and various additional features to boost the performance. A variant of our best model has already been deployed in Taobao, leading to a 2% increase in revenue per thousand impressions and an opt-out rate of merchants less than 4%.