9 research outputs found
Recommendations with Negative Feedback via Pairwise Deep Reinforcement Learning
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of
information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The
vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation
procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed
strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the
capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions
with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a
recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage
Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via
recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items
from users' feedback. Users' feedback can be positive and negative and both
types of feedback have great potentials to boost recommendations. However, the
number of negative feedback is much larger than that of positive one; thus
incorporating them simultaneously is challenging since positive feedback could
be buried by negative one. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to
incorporate them into the proposed deep recommender system (DEERS) framework.
The experimental results based on real-world e-commerce data demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments have been
conducted to understand the importance of both positive and negative feedback
in recommendations.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1801.0020
Collaborative Group Learning
Collaborative learning has successfully applied knowledge transfer to guide a
pool of small student networks towards robust local minima. However, previous
approaches typically struggle with drastically aggravated student
homogenization when the number of students rises. In this paper, we propose
Collaborative Group Learning, an efficient framework that aims to diversify the
feature representation and conduct an effective regularization. Intuitively,
similar to the human group study mechanism, we induce students to learn and
exchange different parts of course knowledge as collaborative groups. First,
each student is established by randomly routing on a modular neural network,
which facilitates flexible knowledge communication between students due to
random levels of representation sharing and branching. Second, to resist the
student homogenization, students first compose diverse feature sets by
exploiting the inductive bias from sub-sets of training data, and then
aggregate and distill different complementary knowledge by imitating a random
sub-group of students at each time step. Overall, the above mechanisms are
beneficial for maximizing the student population to further improve the model
generalization without sacrificing computational efficiency. Empirical
evaluations on both image and text tasks indicate that our method significantly
outperforms various state-of-the-art collaborative approaches whilst enhancing
computational efficiency.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021; Camera ready versio
Automatic Product Copywriting for E-commerce
Product copywriting is a critical component of e-commerce recommendation platforms. It aims to attract users' interest and improve user experience by highlighting product characteristics with textual descriptions. In this paper, we report our experience deploying the proposed Automatic Product Copywriting Generation (APCG) system into the JD.com e-commerce product recommendation platform. It consists of two main components: 1) natural language generation, which is built from a transformer-pointer network and a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model based on millions of training data from our in-house platform; and 2) copywriting quality control, which is based on both automatic evaluation and human screening. For selected domains, the models are trained and updated daily with the updated training data. In addition, the model is also used as a real-time writing assistant tool on our live broadcast platform. The APCG system has been deployed in JD.com since Feb 2021. By Sep 2021, it has generated 2.53 million product descriptions, and improved the overall averaged click-through rate (CTR) and the Conversion Rate (CVR) by 4.22% and 3.61%, compared to baselines, respectively on a year-on-year basis. The accumulated Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) made by our system is improved by 213.42%, compared to the number in Feb 2021
Intelligent Online Selling Point Extraction for E-commerce Recommendation
In the past decade, automatic product description generation for e-commerce have witnessed significant advancement. As the services provided by e-commerce platforms become diverse, it is necessary to dynamically adapt the patterns of descriptions generated. The selling point of products is an important type of product description for which the length should be as short as possible while still conveying key information. In addition, this kind of product description should be eye-catching to the readers. Currently, product selling points are normally written by human experts. Thus, the creation and maintenance of these contents incur high costs. These costs can be significantly reduced if product selling points can be automatically generated by machines. In this paper, we report our experience developing and deploying the Intelligent Online Selling Point Extraction (IOSPE) system to serve the recommendation system in the JD.com e-commerce platform. Since July 2020, IOSPE has become a core service for 62 key categories of products (covering more than 4 million products). So far, it has generated more than 1.1 billion selling points, thereby significantly scaling up the selling point creation operation and saving human labour. These IOSPE generated selling points have increased the click-through rate (CTR) by 1.89% and the average duration the customers spent on the products by more than 2.03% compared to the previous practice, which are significant improvements for such a large-scale e-commerce platform