2023/10/05 by Kirill Khrylchenko, Khrylchenko, Kirill, Alexander Fritzler +1 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Expert finding and Q&A systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Information Retrieval and Search Behavior #Recommender Systems and Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.03481
openalex publication_date 2023/10/05 · openalex created_date 2023/10/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.