The ranking stage serves as the central optimization and allocation hub in advertising systems, governing economic value distribution through eCPM and orchestrating the user-centric blending of organic and advertising content. Prevailing ranking models often rely on fragmented modules and hand-crafted features, limiting their ability to interpret complex user intent. This challenge is further amplified in location-based services such as food delivery, where user decisions are shaped by dynamic spatial, temporal, and individual contexts. To address these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework that reframes ranking as a context comprehension task, modeling heterogeneous signals in a unified architecture. Our architecture consists of two core components: the Generative Contextual Encoder (GCE) and the Generative Contextual Fusion (GCF). The GCE comprises three specialized modules: a Personalized Context Enhancer (PCE) for user-specific modeling, a Collective Context Enhancer (CCE) for group-level patterns, and a Dynamic Context Enhancer (DCE) for real-time situational adaptation. The GCF module then seamlessly integrates these contextual representations through low-rank adaptation. Extensive experiments confirm that our method achieves significant gains in critical business metrics, including click-through rate and platform revenue. We have successfully deployed our method on a large-scale food delivery advertising platform, demonstrating its substantial practical impact. This work pioneers a new perspective on generative recommendation and highlights its practical potential in industrial advertising systems.

The state-of-the-art methods for e-commerce product background generation suffer from the inefficiency of designing product-wise prompts when scaling up the production, as well as the ineffectiveness of describing fine-grained styles when customizing personalized backgrounds for some specific brands. To address these obstacles, we integrate the category commonality and personalized style into diffusion models. Concretely, we propose a Category-Wise Generator to enable large-scale background generation with only one model for the first time. A unique identifier in the prompt is assigned to each category, whose attention is located on the background by a mask-guided cross attention layer to learn the category-wise style. Furthermore, for products with specific and fine-grained requirements in layout, elements, etc, a Personality-Wise Generator is devised to learn such personalized style directly from a reference image to resolve textual ambiguities, and is trained in a self-supervised manner for more efficient training data usage. To advance research in this field, the first large-scale e-commerce product background generation dataset BG60k is constructed, which covers more than 60k product images from over 2k categories. Experiments demonstrate that our method could generate high-quality backgrounds for different categories, and maintain the personalized background style of reference images. BG60k will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/BG60k.

E-commerce has become an integral part of daily life, and the ability to effectively retrieve items relevant to a user's query is crucial for enhancing the shopping experience. Embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has proven to be an effective approach in industrial e-commerce search systems. This method involves training models to generate high-quality representations of queries and items, followed by the use of efficient approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search techniques to find relevant items. However, current EBR methods face several critical limitations: (1) multiple EBR branches often retrieve overlapping or redundant result sets; (2) allocation and utilization of computational resources remain suboptimal, hindering performance; (3) the differentiation modeling of features is somewhat neglected, which restricts the system's ability to retrieve diverse and representative results. These issues hinder the retrieval performance of online search systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel e-commerce search framework called the Uniform Embedding-based Retrieval Framework (UniERF). This framework is meticulously designed to incorporate diverse samples for joint model training, enabling the model to effectively leverage both the semantic information of queries and the personalized features of different users. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate that UniERF surpasses baseline methods across various evaluation metrics. UniERF has been successfully implemented in the existing retrieval system at JD.COM, a renowned online shopping website.

The retrieval system is a crucial module in e-commerce search advertising that matches user queries with ads. The diverse expressions of users often produce massive tail queries that cannot match merchant bidwords, leading to poor retrieval efficiency. Existing methods, such as query log mining and vector matching, fail to optimize relevance, authenticity, and ad revenue of the rewrite.

Accurate click-through rate (CTR) prediction is critical for online advertising, relying on regular features like browsing history and demographics and post-event features such as exposed position and detailed page behaviors. However, post-event features, unavailable during inference, often face training-inference inconsistency and low coverage issues, especially post-click features like dwell time that are available only for clicked items. To address these challenges, we propose Causal Optimal Transport (COT), a novel framework that (1) generates pseudo post-click features via semi-supervised pseudo-labeling (2) causally generates accurate feature distributions using a Causal Distribution Shaper (CDS), and (3) refines generated features through optimal transport to minimize distributional divergence, facilitating further knowledge transfer. Experiments on real-world data confirm COT's superiority and practical efficacy in enhancing CTR prediction via improved user interest modeling and bias mitigation. Theoretical guarantees underpin the framework's robustness.

In web data, advertising images are crucial for capturing user attention and improving advertising effectiveness. Most existing methods generate background for products primarily focus on the aesthetic quality, which may fail to achieve satisfactory online performance. To address this limitation, we explore the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for generating advertising images by optimizing for Click-Through Rate (CTR) as the primary objective. Firstly, we build targeted pre-training tasks, and leverage a large-scale e-commerce multimodal dataset to equip MLLMs with initial capabilities for advertising image generation tasks. To further improve the CTR of generated images, we propose a novel reward model to fine-tune pre-trained MLLMs through Reinforcement Learning (RL), which can jointly utilize multimodal features and accurately reflect user click preferences. Meanwhile, a product-centric preference optimization strategy is developed to ensure that the generated background content aligns with the product characteristics after fine-tuning, enhancing the overall relevance and effectiveness of the advertising images. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both online and offline metrics. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/Chenguoz/CAIG.

Creativity is the heart and soul of advertising services. Effective creatives can create a win-win scenario: advertisers each target users and achieve marketing objectives more effectively, users more quickly find products of interest, and platforms generate more advertising revenue. With the advent of AI-Generated Content, advertisers now can produce vast amounts of creative content at a minimal cost. The current challenge lies in how advertising systems can select the most pertinent creative in real-time for each user personally. Existing methods typically perform serial ranking of ads or creatives, limiting the creative module in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose for the first time a novel architecture for online parallel estimation of ads and creatives ranking, as well as the corresponding offline joint optimization model. The online architecture enables sophisticated personalized creative modeling while reducing overall latency. The offline joint model for CTR estimation allows mutual awareness and collaborative optimization between ads and creatives. Additionally, we optimize the offline evaluation metrics for the implicit feedback sorting task involved in ad creative ranking. We conduct extensive experiments to compare ours with two state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both offline evaluations and real-world advertising platforms online in terms of response time, CTR, and CPM.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant advancements in click-through rate (CTR) prediction by demonstrating strong generalization on training data. However, in real-world scenarios, the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) conditions, which is fundamental to this problem, is often violated due to temporal distribution shifts. This violation can lead to suboptimal model performance when optimizing empirical risk without access to future data, resulting in overfitting on the training data and convergence to a single sharp minimum. To address this challenge, we propose a novel model updating framework called Slow and Fast Trajectory Learning (SFTL) network. SFTL aims to mitigate the discrepancy between past and future domains while quickly adapting to recent changes in small temporal drifts. This mechanism entails two interactions among three complementary learners: (i) the Working Learner, which updates model parameters using modern optimizers (e.g., Adam, Adagrad) and serves as the primary learner in the recommendation system, (ii) the Slow Learner, which is updated in each temporal domain by directly assigning the model weights of the working learner, and (iii) the Fast Learner, which is updated in each iteration by assigning exponentially moving average weights of the working learner. Additionally, we propose a novel rank-based trajectory loss to facilitate interaction between the working learner and trajectory learner, aiming to adapt to temporal drift and enhance performance in the current domain compared to the past. We provide theoretical understanding and conduct extensive experiments on real-world CTR prediction datasets to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of SFTL in terms of both convergence speed and model performance. The results demonstrate the superiority of SFTL over existing approaches.

In the dynamic landscape of online advertising, decoding user intent remains a pivotal challenge, particularly in the context of query classification. Swift classification models, exemplified by FastText, cater to the demand for real-time responses but encounter limitations in handling intricate queries. Conversely, accuracy-centric models like BERT introduce challenges associated with increased latency. This paper undertakes a nuanced exploration, navigating the delicate balance between efficiency and accuracy. It unveils FastText's latent potential as an 'online dictionary' for historical queries while harnessing the semantic robustness of BERT for novel and complex scenarios. The proposed Distribution-Diverse Multi-Expert (DDME) framework employs multiple teacher models trained from diverse data distributions. Through meticulous data categorization and enrichment, it elevates the classification performance across the query spectrum. Empirical results within the JD ads search system validate the superiority of our proposed approaches.

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.

Online recommenders have attained growing interest and created great revenue for businesses. Given numerous users and items, incremental update becomes a mainstream paradigm for learning large-scale models in industrial scenarios, where only newly arrived data within a sliding window is fed into the model, meeting the strict requirements of quick response. However, this strategy would be prone to overfitting to newly arrived data. When there exists a significant drift of data distribution, the long-term information would be discarded, which harms the recommendation performance. Conventional methods address this issue through native model-based continual learning methods, without analyzing the data characteristics for online recommenders. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose an incremental update framework for online recommenders with Data-Driven Prior (DDP), which is composed of Feature Prior (FP) and Model Prior (MP). The FP performs the click estimation for each specific value to enhance the stability of the training process. The MP incorporates previous model output into the current update while strictly following the Bayes rules, resulting in a theoretically provable prior for the robust update. In this way, both the FP and MP are well integrated into the unified framework, which is model-agnostic and can accommodate various advanced interaction models. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets as well as an industrial dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework. © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Poster layout is a crucial aspect of poster design. Prior methods primarily focus on the correlation between visual content and graphic elements. However, a pleasant layout should also consider the relationship between visual and textual contents and the relationship between elements. In this study, we introduce a relation-aware diffusion model for poster layout generation that incorporates these two relationships in the generation process. Firstly, we devise a visual-textual relation-aware module that aligns the visual and textual representations across modalities, thereby enhancing the layout's efficacy in conveying textual information. Subsequently, we propose a geometry relation-aware module that learns the geometry relationship between elements by comprehensively considering contextual information. Additionally, the proposed method can generate diverse layouts based on user constraints. To advance research in this field, we have constructed a poster layout dataset named CGL-Dataset V2. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CGL-Dataset V2. The data and code will be available at https://github.com/liuan0803/RADM.

It is noted that Click-Through-Rate(CTR) prediction plays an important part in recommendation systems and online advertising. Over the past few years, numerous studies have been conducted to improve the accuracy of CTR prediction by exploring data inherent patterns. These studies indicate that training CTR models with group-specific parameters on divided data groups can lead to significant improvements. However, most works generally divide groups manually with some prior knowledge, and such a fixed group division method may hinder the expression of user common interests. To address this limitation, we propose a novel group parameter modeling method, where the user group division and group parameter learning processes are completed in an automatic and dynamic way. Our method employs a three-stage approach, consisting of group information selection, group representation learning, and group parameter generation, which allows the efficient expression of user common interests. We conduct experiments on both public datasets and industrial datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We have also deployed the model in an online advertising system and observed significant improvements in both CTR and Revenue Per Mille (RPM).

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.

Product image segmentation is vital in e-commerce. Most existing methods extract the product image foreground only based on the visual modality, making it difficult to distinguish irrelevant products. As product titles contain abundant appearance information and provide complementary cues for product image segmentation, we propose a mutual query network to segment products based on both visual and linguistic modalities. First, we design a language query vision module to obtain the response of language description in image areas, thus aligning the visual and linguistic representations across modalities. Then, a vision query language module utilizes the correlation between visual and linguistic modalities to filter the product title and effectively suppress the content irrelevant to the vision in the title. To promote the research in this field, we also construct a Multi-Modal Product Segmentation dataset (MMPS), which contains 30,000 images and corresponding titles. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on MMPS.

Large-scale industrial systems often include multiple scenarios to satisfy diverse user needs. The common approach of using one model per scenario does not scale well and not suitable for minor scenarios with limited samples. An solution is to train a model on all scenarios, which can introduce domination and bias from the main scenario. MMoE-like structures have been proposed for multi-scenario prediction, but they do not explicitly address the issue of gradient unbalancing. This work proposes an adaptive loss harmonizing (ALH) algorithm for multi-scenario CTR prediction. It dynamically adjusts the learning speed for balanced training and improved performance. Experiments on real industrial datasets and rigorous A/B testing prove our method’s superiority.

Thompson Sampling (TS) is an effective way to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma for the multi-armed (contextual) bandit problem. Due to the sophisticated relationship between contexts and rewards in real- world applications, neural networks are often preferable to model this relationship owing to their superior representation capacity. In this paper, we study the problem of combining neural networks with TS in a plug-and-play manner. The basic idea is to maintain a posterior distribution over the reward mean relying on the prediction and the deep representation of the neural network for any given context. Specifically, our proposed algorithm, PlugTS (Pluggable deep Thompson Sampling), introduces no change into the network training process, but only requires one additional sampling stage during serving - sampling from a univariate Gaussian distribution (by maintaining a positive definite matrix). Theoretically, we prove that PlugTS achieves an regret bound, which matches the state-of-the-art neural network-based TS, while PlugTS enjoys much lower computational overhead for each iteration. Experimental results on public datasets among traditional classification and recommendation tasks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of PlugTS. Furthermore, it is inspiring for real-world applications that a simplified version of PlugTS has been deployed in an industrial advertising recommender system of one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, JD.com, achieving significant improvement in both RPM (Revenue Per Mille) and CTR (Click-Through Rate) in online A/B testing. The appendix and code are available at https://github.com/adsturing/PlugTS.

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.

CTR prediction is crucial in recommendation systems and online advertising platforms, where user-generated data streams that drift over time can lead to catastrophic forgetting if the model continuously adapts to new data distribution. Conventional strategies for catastrophic forgetting are challenging to deploy due to memory constraints and diverse data distributions. To address this, we propose a novel drift-aware incremental learning framework based on ensemble learning for CTR prediction, which uses explicit error-based drift detection on streaming data to strengthen well-adapted ensembles and freeze ensembles that do not match the input distribution, avoiding catastrophic interference. Our method outperforms all baselines considered in offline experiments and A/B tests.

Industrial systems such as recommender systems and online advertising, have been widely equipped with multi-stage architectures, which are divided into several cascaded modules, including matching, pre-ranking, ranking and re-ranking. As a critical bridge between matching and ranking, existing pre-ranking approaches mainly endure sample selection bias (SSB) problem owing to ignoring the entire-chain data dependence, resulting in sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we rethink pre-ranking system from the perspective of the entire sample space, and propose Entire-chain Cross-domain Models (ECM), which leverage samples from the whole cascaded stages to effectively alleviate SSB problem. Besides, we design a fine-grained neural structure named ECMM to further improve the pre-ranking accuracy. Specifically, we propose a cross-domain multi-tower neural network to comprehensively predict for each stage result, and introduce the sub-networking routing strategy with L0 regularization to reduce computational costs. Evaluations on real-world large-scale traffic logs demonstrate that our pre-ranking models outperform SOTA methods while time consumption is maintained within an acceptable level, which achieves better trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness.

Click-through rate (CTR) Prediction is of great importance in real-world online ads systems. One challenge for the CTR prediction task is to capture the real interest of users from their clicked items, which is inherently influenced by presented positions of items, i.e., more front positions tend to obtain higher CTR values. Therefore, It is crucial to make CTR models aware of the exposed position of the items. A popular line of existing works focuses on explicitly model exposed position by result randomization which is expensive and inefficient, or by inverse propensity weighting (IPW) which relies heavily on the quality of the propensity estimation. Another common solution is modeling position as features during offline training and simply adopting fixed value or dropout tricks when serving. However, training-inference inconsistency can lead to sub-optimal performance. This work proposes a simple yet efficient knowledge distillation framework to model the impact of exposed position and leverage position information to improve CTR prediction. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed method on a real-world production dataset and online A/B tests, achieving significant improvements over competing baseline models. The proposed method has been deployed in the real world online ads systems of JD, serving main traffic of hundreds of millions of active users.

The exposure sequence is being actively studied for user interest modeling in Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction. However, the existing methods for exposure sequence modeling bring extensive computational burden and neglect noise problems, resulting in an excessively latency and the limited performance in online recommenders. In this paper, we propose to address the high latency and noise problems via Gating-adapted wavelet multiresolution analysis (Gama), which can effectively denoise the extremely long exposure sequence and adaptively capture the implied multi-dimension user interest with linear computational complexity. This is the first attempt to integrate non-parametric multiresolution analysis technique into deep neural network to model user exposure sequence. Extensive experiments on large scale benchmark dataset and real production dataset confirm the effectiveness of Gama for exposure sequence modeling, especially in cold-start scenarios. Benefited from its low latency and high effecitveness, Gama has been deployed in our real large-scale industrial recommender, successfully serving over hundreds of millions users.

We propose a general Variational Embedding Learning Framework (VELF) for alleviating the severe cold-start problem in CTR prediction. VELF addresses the cold start problem via alleviating over-fits caused by data-sparsity in two ways: learning probabilistic embedding, and incorporating trainable and regularized priors which utilize the rich side information of cold start users and advertisements (Ads). The two techniques are naturally integrated into a variational inference framework, forming an end-to-end training process. Abundant empirical tests on benchmark datasets well demonstrate the advantages of our proposed VELF. Besides, extended experiments confirmed that our parameterized and regularized priors provide more generalization capability than traditional fixed priors.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a crucial role in sponsored search advertising (search ads). User click behavior usually showcases strong comparison patterns among relevant/competing items within the user awareness. Explicit user awareness could be characterized by user behavior sequence modeling, which however suffers from issues such as cold start, behavior noise and hidden channels. Instead, in this paper, we study the problem of modeling implicit user awareness about relevant/competing items. We notice that candidate items of the CTR prediction model could play as surrogates for relevant/competing items within the user awareness. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel framework, named CIM (Candidate Item Modeling), to characterize users’ awareness on candidate items. CIM introduces an additional module to encode candidate items into a context vector and therefore is plug-and-play for existing neural network-based CTR prediction models. Offline experiments on a ten-billion-scale production dataset collected from the real traffic of a search advertising system, together with the corresponding online A/B testing, demonstrate CIM’s superior performance. Notably, CIM has been deployed in production at JD.com, serving the main traffic of hundreds of millions of users, which shows great application value. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/kaifuzheng/cim.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction based on deep neural networks has made significant progress in recommendation systems. However, these methods often suffer from CTR underestimation due to insufficient impressions for long-tail items. When formalizing CTR prediction as a contextual bandit problem, exploration methods provide a natural solution addressing this issue. In this paper, we first benchmark state-of-the-art exploration methods in the recommendation system setting. We find that the combination of gradient-based uncertainty modeling and Thompson Sampling achieves a significant advantage. On the basis of the benchmark, we further propose a general enhancement strategy, Underestimation Refinement (UR), which explicitly incorporates the prior knowledge that insufficient impressions likely leads to CTR underestimation. This strategy is applicable to almost all the existing exploration methods. Experimental results validate UR's effectiveness, achieving consistent improvement across all baseline exploration methods.