It has become increasingly common that sponsored content (i.e., paid ads) and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users, especially on e-commerce platforms. Thus, both of these contents may interact together to influence their engagement behaviors. In general, sponsored content helps brands achieve their marketing goals and provides ad revenue to the platforms. In contrast, non-sponsored content contributes to the long-term health of the platform through increasing users' engagement. A key conundrum to platforms is learning how to blend both of these contents allowing their interactions to be considered and balancing these business objectives. This paper proposes a system built for this purpose and applied to product detail pages of JD.COM, an e-commerce company. This system achieves three objectives: (a) Optimization of competing business objectives via Virtual Bids allowing the expressiveness of the valuation of the platform for these objectives. (b) Modeling the users' click behaviors considering explicitly the influence exerted by the sponsored and non-sponsored content displayed alongside through a deep learning approach. (c) Consideration of a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) Auction design compatible with the allocation of ads and its induced externalities. Experiments are presented demonstrating the performance of the proposed system. Moreover, our approach is fully deployed and serves all traffic through JD.COM's mobile application.

Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based methods have become novel state-of-the-arts for Collaborative Filtering (CF) based Recommender Systems. To obtain users' preferences over different items, it is a common practice to learn representations of users and items by performing embedding propagation on a user-item bipartite graph, and then calculate the preference scores based on the representations. However, in most existing algorithms, user/item representations are generated independently of target items/users. To address this problem, we propose a novel graph attention model named Bilateral Interactive GCN (BI-GCN), which introduces bilateral interactive guidance into each user-item pair and thus leads to target-aware representations for preference prediction. Specifically, to learn the user/item representation from its neighborhood, we assign higher attention weights to those neighbors similar to the target item/user. By this manner, we can obtain target-aware representations, i.e., the information of the target item/user is explicitly encoded in the corresponding user/item representation, for more precise matching. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of BI-GCN.

Organic recommendation and advertising recommendation usually coexist on e-commerce platforms. In this paper, we study the problem of utilizing data from organic recommendation to reinforce click-through rate prediction in advertising scenarios from a multi-view learning perspective. We propose a novel method, termed LOVF (Layered Organic View Fusion). LOVF implements a multi-view fusion mechanism - for each advertising instance, LOVF derives deep representations layer-by-layer from the organic recommendation view and these deep representations are then fused into the corresponding vanilla representations of the advertising view. Extensive experiments across a variety of backbones demonstrate LOVF's generality, effectiveness and efficiency on a new real-world production dataset. The dataset encompasses data from both the organic recommendation and advertising scenarios. Notably, LOVF has been successfully deployed in the advertising recommender system of JD.com, which is one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms; online A/B testing shows that LOVF achieves impressive improvement on advertising clicks and revenue. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/adsturing/lovf for facilitating further research.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks for e-commerce search engines. As search becomes more personalized, it is necessary to capture the user interest from rich behavior data. Existing user behavior modeling algorithms develop different attention mechanisms to emphasize query-relevant behaviors and suppress irrelevant ones. Despite being extensively studied, these attentions still suffer from two limitations. First, conventional attentions mostly limit the attention field only to a single user's behaviors, which is not suitable in e-commerce where users often hunt for new demands that are irrelevant to any historical behaviors. Second, these attentions are usually biased towards frequent behaviors, which is unreasonable since high frequency does not necessarily indicate great importance. To tackle the two limitations, we propose a novel attention mechanism, termed Kalman Filtering Attention (KFAtt), that considers the weighted pooling in attention as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. By incorporating a priori, KFAtt resorts to global statistics when few user behaviors are relevant. Moreover, a frequency capping mechanism is incorporated to correct the bias towards frequent behaviors. Offline experiments on both benchmark and a 10 billion scale real production dataset, together with an Online A/B test, show that KFAtt outperforms all compared state-of-the-arts. KFAtt has been deployed in the ranking system of JD.com, one of the largest B2C e-commerce websites in China, serving the main traffic of hundreds of millions of active users.