Experimental design is critical for evidence-based decision-making in healthcare, marketing, and public policy. However, designing efficient experiments across heterogeneous subgroups presents significant challenges. Existing methods often optimize for statistical power or overall sample efficiency, overlooking crucial fairness considerations across these different subgroups. To address this gap, we introduce a Fairness-Aware Contextual Track-and-Stop Design (F-CTSD) algorithm. The proposed F-CTSD algorithm provides statistical guarantees on subgroup fairness while minimizing required sample sizes. We quantify the fairness-efficiency trade-off and derive the sample complexity bound for the proposed F-CTSD algorithm under its fairness constraints. We further theoretically prove that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm consistently produces accurate treatment effect estimates even under fairness requirements, enhancing statistical reliability. Numerical experiments show that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm outperforms existing methods, achieving higher sample efficiency while reducing subgroup fairness violations by 4.95%.

Learning-to-rank (LTR) is a fundamental component of modern large-scale information retrieval (IR) systems, playing an essential role across various stages of the ranking pipeline. Recently, differentiable sorting networks have attracted increasing attention for LTR as a permutation-level learning paradigm, enabling end-to-end optimization directly on ranking structure. However, existing approaches suffer from two critical limitations: (i) permutation-matrix fidelity, i.e., the predicted soft permutation matrix may deviate from the exact hard permutation matrix required by permutation-level objectives; and (ii) uncertainty in target ordering arising from coarse or tied relevance labels, where the ground-truth order is set-valued rather than unique.

Auto-bidding is widely used in advertising systems, serving a diverse range of advertisers. Generative bidding is increasingly gaining traction due to its strong planning capabilities and generalizability. Unlike traditional reinforcement learning-based bidding, generative bidding does not depend on the Markov Decision Process (MDP), thereby exhibiting superior planning performance in long-horizon scenarios. Conditional diffusion modeling approaches have shown significant promise in the field of auto-bidding. However, relying solely on return as the optimality criterion is insufficient to guarantee the generation of truly optimal decision sequences, as it lacks personalized structural information. Moreover, the auto-regressive generation mechanism of diffusion models inherently introduces timeliness risks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel conditional diffusion modeling approach that integrates expert trajectory guidance with a skip-step sampling strategy to improve generation efficiency. The efficacy of this method has been demonstrated through comprehensive offline experiments and further substantiated by statistically significant outcomes in online A/B testing, yielding an 11.29% increase in conversions and a 12.36% growth in revenue relative to the baseline.

In many machine learning tasks, it is often necessary for the relationship between input and output variables to be monotonic, including both strictly monotonic and implicitly monotonic relationships. Traditional methods for maintaining monotonicity mainly rely on construction or regularization techniques, whereas this paper shows that the issue of strict monotonic probability can be viewed as a partial order between an observable revenue variable and a latent cost variable. This perspective enables us to reformulate the monotonicity challenge into modeling the latent cost variable. To tackle this, we introduce a generative network for the latent cost variable, termed the Generative Cost Model (GCM), which inherently addresses the strict monotonic problem, and propose the Implicit Generative Cost Model (IGCM) to address the implicit monotonic problem. We further validate our approach with a numerical simulation of quantile regression and conduct multiple experiments on public datasets, showing that our method significantly outperforms existing monotonic modeling techniques. The code for our experiments can be found at https://github.com/tyxaaron/GCM.

Recovering potential user preferences from user-item interaction matrices is a key challenge in recommender systems. While diffusion models can sample and reconstruct preferences from latent distributions, they often fail to capture similar users' collective preferences effectively. Additionally, latent variables degrade into pure Gaussian noise during the forward process, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio, which in turn degrades performance. To address this, we propose S-Diff, inspired by graph-based collaborative filtering, better to utilize low-frequency components in the graph spectral domain. S-Diff maps user interaction vectors into the spectral domain and parameterizes diffusion noise to align with graph frequency. As a result, this anisotropic diffusion retains significant low-frequency components, preserving a high signal-to-noise ratio. S-Diff further employs a conditional denoising network to encode user interactions, recovering true preferences from noisy data. This method achieves promising results across multiple datasets.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in navigating users through vast reservoirs of information. However, data sparseness can compromise recommendation accuracy, making it challenging to improve recommendation performance. To address this issue, researchers have explored incorporating multiple data types. Yet, this approach can introduce noise that impairs the recommendations' accuracy. Therefore, it is crucial to denoise the data to enhance recommendation quality. This tutorial highlights the importance of data denoising metrics for improving the accuracy and quality of recommendations. Four groups of data denoising metrics are introduced: feature, item, pattern, and modality level. For each group, various denoising methods are presented. The tutorial emphasizes the significance of selecting the right data denoising methods to enhance recommendation quality. It provides valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers implementing reliable data denoising metrics in recommender systems. Finally, the tutorial proposes open research questions for future studies, making it a valuable resource for the research community.

In large-scale recommender systems, retrieving top N relevant candidates accurately with resource constrain is crucial. To evaluate the performance of such retrieval models, [email protected], the frequency of positive samples being retrieved in the top N ranking, is widely used. However, most of the conventional loss functions for retrieval models such as softmax cross-entropy and pairwise comparison methods do not directly optimize [email protected] Moreover, those conventional loss functions cannot be customized for the specific retrieval size N required by each application and thus may lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we proposed the Customizable R[email protected] Optimization Loss (CROLoss), a loss function that can directly optimize the [email protected] metrics and is customizable for different choices of N. This proposed CROLoss formulation defines a more generalized loss function space, covering most of the conventional loss functions as special cases. Furthermore, we develop the Lambda method, a gradient-based method that invites more flexibility and can further boost the system performance. We evaluate the proposed CROLoss on two public benchmark datasets. The results show that CROLoss achieves SOTA results over conventional loss functions for both datasets with various choices of retrieval size N. CROLoss has been deployed onto our online E-commerce advertising platform, where a fourteen-day online A/B test demonstrated that CROLoss contributes to a significant business revenue growth of 4.75%.

Rich user behavior information is of great importance for capturing and understanding user interest in click-through rate (CTR) prediction. To improve the richness, collecting long-term behaviors becomes a typical approach in academy and industry but at the cost of increasing online storage and latency. Recently, researchers have proposed several approaches to shorten long-term behavior sequence and then model user interests. These approaches reduce online cost efficiently but do not well handle the noisy information in long-term user behavior, which may deteriorate the performance of CTR prediction significantly. To obtain better cost/performance trade-off, we propose a novel Adversarial Filtering Model (ADFM) to model long-term user behavior. ADFM uses a hierarchical aggregation representation to compress raw behavior sequence and then learns to remove useless behavior information with an adversarial filtering mechanism. The selected user behaviors are fed into interest extraction module for CTR prediction. Experimental results on public datasets and industrial dataset demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models.