5 research outputs found
Efficient Large-Scale Visual Representation Learning
In this article, we present our approach to single-modality visual
representation learning. Understanding visual representations of product
content is vital for recommendations, search, and advertising applications in
e-commerce. We detail and contrast techniques used to fine-tune large-scale
visual representation learning models in an efficient manner under low-resource
settings, including several pretrained backbone architectures, both in the
convolutional neural network as well as the vision transformer family. We
highlight the challenges for e-commerce applications at-scale and highlight the
efforts to more efficiently train, evaluate, and serve visual representations.
We present ablation studies evaluating the representation offline performance
for several downstream tasks, including our visually similar ad
recommendations. To this end, we present a novel text-to-image generative
offline evaluation method for visually similar recommendation systems. Finally,
we include online results from deployed machine learning systems in production
at Etsy
adSformers: Personalization from Short-Term Sequences and Diversity of Representations in Etsy Ads
In this article, we present a general approach to personalizing ads through
encoding and learning from variable-length sequences of recent user actions and
diverse representations. To this end we introduce a three-component module
called the adSformer diversifiable personalization module (ADPM) that learns a
dynamic user representation. We illustrate the module's effectiveness and
flexibility by personalizing the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Post-Click
Conversion Rate (PCCVR) models used in sponsored search. The first component of
the ADPM, the adSformer encoder, includes a novel adSformer block which learns
the most salient sequence signals. ADPM's second component enriches the learned
signal through visual, multimodal, and other pretrained representations.
Lastly, the third ADPM "learned on the fly" component further diversifies the
signal encoded in the dynamic user representation. The ADPM-personalized CTR
and PCCVR models, henceforth referred to as adSformer CTR and adSformer PCCVR,
outperform the CTR and PCCVR production baselines by and ,
respectively, in offline Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve
(ROC-AUC). Following the robust online gains in A/B tests, Etsy Ads deployed
the ADPM-personalized sponsored search system to of traffic as of
February 2023
Chronic Wasting Disease: The Effects of Environmental Prion Density and Interactions Between Populations on Disease Dynamics
27 pages, 1 article*Chronic Wasting Disease: The Effects of Environmental Prion Density and Interactions Between Populations on Disease Dynamics* (Hurtado, Paul; Mejran, Marcin; Morales, Thela; Schwager, David; Lanham, Michael) 27 page
Raves, Clubs, and Ecstacy: The Impact of Peer Pressure
47 pages, 1 article*Raves, Clubs, and Ecstacy: The Impact of Peer Pressure* (Castillo-Garsow, Melissa; Henson, Leilani; Mejran, Marcin; Rios-Soto, Karen R.) 47 page
Raves, Clubs and Ecstasy: The Impact of Peer Pressure
Ecstasy has gained popularity among young adults who frequent raves and nightclubs. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported a 500 percent increase in the use of ecstasy between 1993 and 1998. The number of ecstasy users kept growing until 2002, years after a national public education initiative against ecstasy use was launched. In this study, a system of differential equations is used to model the peer-driven dynamics of ecstasy use. It is found that backward bifurcations describe situations when sufficient peer pressure can cause an epidemic of ecstasy use. Furthermore, factors that have the greatest influence on ecstasy use as predicted by the model are high-lighted. The effect of education is also explored, and the results of simulations are shown to illustrate some possible outcomes