Title
U-rank: Utility-oriented Learning to Rank with Implicit Feedback
Abstract
Learning to rank with implicit feedback is one of the most important tasks in many real-world information systems where the objective is some specific utility, e.g., clicks and revenue. However, we point out that existing methods based on probabilistic ranking principle do not necessarily achieve the highest utility. To this end, we propose a novel ranking framework called U-rank that directly optimizes the expected utility of the ranking list. With a position-aware deep click-through rate prediction model, we address the attention bias considering both query-level and item-level features. Due to the item-specific attention bias modeling, the optimization for expected utility corresponds to a maximum weight matching on the item-position bipartite graph. We base the optimization of this objective in an efficient Lambdaloss framework, which is supported by both theoretical and empirical analysis. We conduct extensive experiments for both web search and recommender systems over three benchmark datasets and two proprietary datasets, where the performance gain of U-rank over state-of-the-arts is demonstrated. Moreover, our proposed U-rank has been deployed on a large-scale commercial recommender and a large improvement over the production baseline has been observed in an online A/B testing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3340531.3412756
CIKM '20: The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management Virtual Event Ireland October, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-6859-9
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xinyi Dai1273.19
Jiawei Hou220.70
Qing Liu381.54
Yunjia Xi420.70
Ruiming Tang512519.25
Weinan Zhang6122897.24
Xiuqiang He731239.21
Jun Wang82514138.37
Yong Yu97637380.66