To provide promising recommendation results, there exist three major stages in the industrial RecSys chain to support our service: (1) The first Retrieval model aims at searching hundreds of item candidates. (2) Next, the Ranking model estimates the multiple aspect probabilities Pxtrs for each retrieved item. (3) At last, the Ensemble Sort stage merges those Pxtrs into one comparable score, and then selects the best dozen items with the highest scores to recommend them. To our knowledge, the wide-accepted industry ensemble sort approach still relies on manual formula-based adjustment, i.e., assigning manual weights for Pxtrs to control its influence on fusion score. Under this framework, the RecSys severely relies on expert knowledge to determine satisfactory weight for each Pxtr, which blocks RecSys's further advancements.

In large-scale recommendation systems, modeling long-term user interests is progressively gaining attention among researchers and practitioners. Existing work, such as SIM and TWIN, typically employs a two-stage approach to model long-term user behavior sequences for efficiency concerns. The first stage rapidly retrieves a subset of sequences related to the target item from a long sequence using a search-based mechanism namely the General Search Unit (GSU), while the second stage calculates the interest scores using the Exact Search Unit (ESU) on the retrieved results. Given the extensive length of user behavior sequences spanning the entire life cycle, potentially reaching up to 10^6 in scale, there is currently no effective solution for fully modeling such expansive user interests. To overcome this issue, we introduced TWIN-V2, an enhancement of TWIN, where a divide-and-conquer approach is applied to compress life-cycle behaviors and uncover more accurate and diverse user interests. Specifically, a hierarchical clustering method groups items with similar characteristics in life-cycle behaviors into a single cluster during the offline phase. By limiting the size of clusters, we can compress behavior sequences well beyond the magnitude of 10^5 to a length manageable for online inference in GSU retrieval. Cluster-aware target attention extracts comprehensive and multi-faceted long-term interests of users, thereby making the final recommendation results more accurate and diverse. Extensive offline experiments on a multi-billion-scale industrial dataset and online A/B tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of TWIN-V2. Under an efficient deployment framework, TWIN-V2 has been successfully deployed to the primary traffic that serves hundreds of millions of daily active users at Kuaishou.

Nowadays, many platforms provide users with both search and recommendation services as important tools for accessing information. The phenomenon has led to a correlation between user search and recommendation behaviors, providing an opportunity to model user interests in a fine-grained way. Existing approaches either model user search and recommendation behaviors separately or overlook the different transitions between user search and recommendation behaviors. In this paper, we propose a framework named UniSAR that effectively models the different types of fine-grained behavior transitions for providing users a Unified Search And Recommendation service. Specifically, UniSAR models the user transition behaviors between search and recommendation through three steps: extraction, alignment, and fusion, which are respectively implemented by transformers equipped with pre-defined masks, contrastive learning that aligns the extracted fine-grained user transitions, and cross-attentions that fuse different transitions. To provide users with a unified service, the learned representations are fed into the downstream search and recommendation models. Joint learning on both search and recommendation data is employed to utilize the knowledge and enhance each other. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of UniSAR in terms of enhancing both search and recommendation simultaneously. The experimental analysis further validates that UniSAR enhances the results by successfully modeling the user transition behaviors between search and recommendation.

The confluence of Search and Recommendation (S&R) services is vital to online services, including e-commerce and video platforms. The integration of S&R modeling is a highly intuitive approach adopted by industry practitioners. However, there is a noticeable lack of research conducted in this area within academia, primarily due to the absence of publicly available datasets. Consequently, a substantial gap has emerged between academia and industry regarding research endeavors in joint optimization using user behavior data from both S&R services. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first large-scale, real-world dataset KuaiSAR of integrated Search And Recommendation behaviors collected from Kuaishou, a leading short-video app in China with over 350 million daily active users. Previous research in this field has predominantly employed publicly available semi-synthetic datasets, with artificially fabricated search behaviors. Distinct from previous datasets, KuaiSAR contains genuine user behaviors, including the occurrence of each interaction within either search or recommendation service, and the users' transitions between the two services. This work aids in joint modeling of S&R, and utilizing search data for recommender systems (and recommendation data for search engines). Furthermore, due to the various feedback labels associated with user-video interactions, KuaiSAR also supports a broad range of tasks, including intent recommendation, multi-task learning, and modeling of long sequential multi-behavioral patterns. We believe this dataset will serve as a catalyst for innovative research and bridge the gap between academia and industry in understanding the S&R services in practical, real-world applications. The dataset is available at https://ethan00si.github.io/KuaiSAR/. The dataset is also shared at https://zenodo.org/record/8181109.

Life-long user behavior modeling, i.e., extracting a user's hidden interests from rich historical behaviors in months or even years, plays a central role in modern CTR prediction systems. Conventional algorithms mostly follow two cascading stages: a simple General Search Unit (GSU) for fast and coarse search over tens of thousands of long-term behaviors and an Exact Search Unit (ESU) for effective Target Attention (TA) over the small number of finalists from GSU. Although efficient, existing algorithms mostly suffer from a crucial limitation: the inconsistent target-behavior relevance metrics between GSU and ESU. As a result, their GSU usually misses highly relevant behaviors but retrieves ones considered irrelevant by ESU. In such case, the TA in ESU, no matter how attention is allocated, mostly deviates from the real user interests and thus degrades the overall CTR prediction accuracy. To address such inconsistency, we propose TWo-stage Interest Network (TWIN), where our Consistency-Preserved GSU (CP-GSU) adopts the identical target-behavior relevance metric as the TA in ESU, making the two stages twins. Specifically, to break TA's computational bottleneck and extend it from ESU to GSU, or namely from behavior length 102 to length 104 - 105, we build a novel attention mechanism by behavior feature splitting. For the video inherent features of a behavior, we calculate their linear projection by efficient pre-computing & caching strategies. And for the user-item cross features, we compress each into a one-dimentional bias term in the attention score calculation to save the computational cost. The consistency between two stages, together with the effective TA-based relevance metric in CP-GSU, contributes to significant performance gain in CTR prediction. Offline experiments on a 46 billion scale real production dataset from Kuaishou and an Online A/B test show that TWIN outperforms all compared SOTA algorithms. With optimized online infrastructure, we reduce the computational bottleneck by 99.3%, which contributes to the successful deployment of TWIN on Kuaishou, serving the main traffic of hundreds of millions of active users everyday.

With the increase of content pages and interactive buttons in online services such as online-shopping and video-watching websites, industrial-scale recommender systems face challenges in multi-domain and multi-task recommendations. The core of multi-task and multi-domain recommendation is to accurately capture user interests in multiple scenarios given multiple user behaviors. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play Parameter and Embedding Personalized Network (PEPNet) for multi-domain and multi-task recommendation. PEPNet takes personalized prior information as input and dynamically scales the bottom-level Embedding and top-level DNN hidden units through gate mechanisms. Embedding Personalized Network (EPNet) performs personalized selection on Embedding to fuse features with different importance for different users in multiple domains. Parameter Personalized Network (PPNet) executes personalized modification on DNN parameters to balance targets with different sparsity for different users in multiple tasks. We have made a series of special engineering optimizations combining the Kuaishou training framework and the online deployment environment. By infusing personalized selection of Embedding and personalized modification of DNN parameters, PEPNet tailored to the interests of each individual obtains significant performance gains, with online improvements exceeding 1% in multiple task metrics across multiple domains. We have deployed PEPNet in Kuaishou apps, serving over 300 million users every day.