The Multi-stage Cascading Architecture (MCA), widely adopted in industrial advertising systems to balance efficiency and effectiveness, suffers from critical limitations: 1) ranking inconsistency caused by conflicting modeling objectives and capacity gaps across stages, and 2) the inability to model externalities-mutual influences among candidate ads in ranking stages. These issues degrade system performance and lead to suboptimal platform revenue. In this paper, we present UniROM, an end-to-end generative architecture that Unifies online advertising Ranking as One Model. UniROM replaces cascaded stages with a single model to directly generate optimal ad sequences from the full candidate ad corpus in location-based services (LBS). The primary challenges associated with this approach stem from high costs of feature processing and computational bottlenecks in modeling externalities of large-scale candidate pools. To address these challenges, UniROM introduces an algorithm and engine co-designed hybrid feature service to decouple user and ad feature processing, reducing latency while preserving expressiveness. To efficiently extract intra- and cross-sequence mutual information, we propose RecFormer with an innovative cluster-attention mechanism as its core architectural component. Furthermore, we propose a bi-stage training strategy that integrates pre-training with reinforcement learning-based post-training to meet sophisticated platform and advertising objectives. Extensive offline evaluations on public benchmarks and large-scale online A/B testing on industrial advertising platform have demonstrated the superior performance of UniROM over state-of-the-art MCAs.

Online advertising auctions play a critical role in internet commerce, requiring mechanisms that maximize revenue while ensuring incentive compatibility, user experiences, and real-time efficiency. Existing learning-based auction frameworks advance contextual modeling by considering intra-list dependencies among ads, but still face challenges of insufficient global externality modeling and inefficiencies due to sequential processing. In this paper, we propose the Non-autoregressive Generative Auction with global externalities (NGA), a novel end-to-end auction framework for industrial online advertising. NGA explicitly models global externalities by jointly encoding dependencies among ads and the influence of neighboring organic content. To achieve real-time efficiency, NGA employs a non-autoregressive, constraint-based decoding mechanism and a parallel multi-tower evaluator that unifies list-wise reward and payment computation. Extensive offline experiments and large-scale online A/B tests on commercial advertising platforms demonstrate that NGA achieves superior performance in both effectiveness and efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Social networks are widely recognized as highly effective information sources for social recommendation services. However, previous social recommendation methods assumed that a user’s preference factor and social trust factor shared a common latent feature space. Additionally, few studies have explored the incorporation of social information into the item domain for recommendations. To address these gaps, we propose ExpoEv, a deep collaborative filtering recommendation model that integrates social exposure based on feature evolution for social recommendation services. Specifically, we propose a social exposure module for both user and item domains that considers the number of items that a user’s social friends interact with. Furthermore, we introduce a feature evolution component that enables the incorporation of social exposure information with social trust and attribute factors in the context of social recommendation services. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in the quality of recommendation service.

In Click-through rate (CTR) prediction models, a user’s interest is usually represented as a fixed-length vector based on her history behaviors. Recently, several methods are proposed to learn an attentive weight for each user behavior and conduct weighted sum pooling. However, these methods only manually select several fields from the target item side as the query to interact with the behaviors, neglecting the other target item fields, as well as user and context fields. Directly including all these fields in the attention may introduce noise and deteriorate the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model named AutoAttention, which includes all item/user/context side fields as the query, and assigns a learnable weight for each field pair between behavior fields and query fields. Pruning on these field pairs via these learnable weights lead to automatic field pair selection, so as to identify and remove noisy field pairs. Though including more fields, the computation cost of AutoAttention is still low due to using a simple attention function and field pair selection. Extensive experiments on the public dataset and Tencent’s production dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays an important role in online advertising and recommendation systems, which aims at estimating the probability of a user clicking on a specific item. Feature interaction modeling and user interest modeling methods are two popular domains in CTR prediction, and they have been studied extensively in recent years. However, these methods still suffer from two limitations. First, traditional methods regard item attributes as ID features, while neglecting structure information and relation dependencies among attributes. Second, when mining user interests from user-item interactions, current models ignore user intents and item intents for different attributes, which lacks interpretability. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a novel approach Hierarchical Intention Embedding Network (HIEN), which considers dependencies of attributes based on bottom-up tree aggregation in the constructed attribute graph. HIEN also captures user intents for different item attributes as well as item intents based on our proposed hierarchical attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on both public and production datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, HIEN can be applied as an input module to state-of-the-art CTR prediction methods, bringing further performance lift for these existing models that might already be intensively used in real systems.

Predicting emerging hot events in an early stage is essential for various applications, including information dissemination mining, ads recommendation and etc. Existing techniques either require a long-term observation over the event or features that are expensive to extract. However, given limited data at the early stage of an emerging event, the temporal features of hot events and non-hot events are not distinctive enough yet. In this work, we introduce BEEP, a Bayesian perspective Early stage Event Prediction model, that tackles this dilemma. We formulate the hot event prediction problem by two Semi-Naive Bayes Classifiers, where we consider both the temporal features and structural features and perform distribution test for the selected features. Theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evaluations on two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

Predicting the popularity of a single tweet is useful for both users and enterprises. However, adopting existing topic or event prediction models cannot obtain satisfactory results. The reason is that one topic or event that consists of multiple tweets, has more features and characteristics than a single tweet. In this article, we propose two variations of Heterogeneous Bass models (HBass), originally developed in the field of marketing science, namely Spatial-Temporal Heterogeneous Bass Model (ST-HBass) and Feature-Driven Heterogeneous Bass Model (FD-HBass), to predict the popularity of a single tweet at the early stage and the stable stage. We further design an Interaction Enhancement to improve the performance, which considers the competition and cooperation from different tweets with the common topic. In addition, it is often difficult to depict popularity quantitatively. We design an experiment to get the weight of favorite, retweet and reply, and apply the linear regression to calculate the popularity. Furthermore, we design a clustering method to bound the popular threshold. Once the weight and popular threshold are determined, the status whether a tweet will be popular or not can be justified. Our model is validated by conducting experiments on real-world Twitter data, and the results show the efficiency and accuracy of our model, with less absolute percent error and the best Precision and F-score. In all, we introduce Bass model into social network single-tweet prediction to show it can achieve excellent performance.