In plain words: Yandex trains a matching model that turns a shopper's past activity into a personal score, then fine-tunes it again so its features suit ranking, not just picking candidates. The retrained version ranked homepage items better and now serves millions of users daily.
Abstract · Personalized Transformer-based Ranking for e-Commerce at Yandex
Personalizing user experience with high-quality recommendations based on user activity is vital for e-commerce platforms. This is particularly important in scenarios where the user's intent is not explicit, such as on the homepage. Recently, personalized embedding-based systems have significantly improved the quality of recommendations and search in the e-commerce domain. However, most of these works focus on enhancing the retrieval stage. In this paper, we demonstrate that features produced by retrieval-focused deep learning models are sub-optimal for ranking stage in e-commerce recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training process that fine-tunes two-tower models to achieve optimal ranking performance. We provide a detailed description of our transformer-based two-tower model architecture, which is specifically designed for personalization in e-commerce. Additionally, we introduce a novel technique for debiasing context in offline models and report significant improvements in ranking performance when using web-search queries for e-commerce recommendations. Our model has been successfully deployed at Yandex, serves millions of users daily, and has delivered strong performance in online A/B testing.
Kirill Khrylchenko, Alexander Fritzler
arXiv:2310.03481 · cs.IR · submitted Oct 5, 2023 · updated Oct 9, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · 6 pages, 1 figure, pre-print