Improving multi-scenario learning to rank in e-commerce by exploiting task relationships in the label space
Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information …, 2020•dl.acm.org
Traditional Learning to Rank (LTR) models in E-commerce are usually trained on logged
data from a single domain. However, data may come from multiple domains, such as
hundreds of countries in international E-commerce platforms. Learning a single ranking
function obscures domain differences, while learning multiple functions for each domain
may also be inferior due to ignoring the correlations between domains. It can be formulated
as a multi-task learning problem where multiple tasks share the same feature and label …
data from a single domain. However, data may come from multiple domains, such as
hundreds of countries in international E-commerce platforms. Learning a single ranking
function obscures domain differences, while learning multiple functions for each domain
may also be inferior due to ignoring the correlations between domains. It can be formulated
as a multi-task learning problem where multiple tasks share the same feature and label …
Traditional Learning to Rank (LTR) models in E-commerce are usually trained on logged data from a single domain. However, data may come from multiple domains, such as hundreds of countries in international E-commerce platforms. Learning a single ranking function obscures domain differences, while learning multiple functions for each domain may also be inferior due to ignoring the correlations between domains. It can be formulated as a multi-task learning problem where multiple tasks share the same feature and label space. To solve the above problem, which we name Multi-Scenario Learning to Rank, we propose the Hybrid of implicit and explicit Mixture-of-Experts (HMoE) approach. Our proposed solution takes advantage of Multi-task Mixture-of-Experts to implicitly identify distinctions and commonalities between tasks in the feature space, and improves the performance with a stacked model learning task relationships in the label space explicitly. Furthermore, to enhance the flexibility, we propose an end-to-end optimization method with a task-constrained back-propagation strategy. We empirically verify that the optimization method is more effective than two-stage optimization required by the stacked approach. Experiments on real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that HMoE significantly outperforms the popular multi-task learning methods. HMoE is in-use in the search system of AliExpress and achieved 1.92% revenue gain in the period of one-week online A/B testing. We also release a sampled version of our dataset to facilitate future research.
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