On-device Integrated Re-ranking with Heterogeneous Behavior Modeling

As an emerging field driven by industrial applications, integrated re-ranking combines lists from upstream sources into a single list, and presents it to the user. The quality of integrated re-ranking is especially sensitive to real-time user behaviors and preferences. However, existing methods are all built on the cloud-to-edge framework, where mixed lists are generated by the cloud model and then sent to the devices. Despite its effectiveness, such a framework fails to capture users' real-time preferences due to the network bandwidth and latency. Hence, we propose to place the integrated re-ranking model on devices, allowing for the full exploitation of real-time behaviors. To achieve this, we need to address two key issues: first, how to extract users' preferences for different sources from heterogeneous and imbalanced user behaviors; second, how to explore the correlation between the extracted personalized preferences and the candidate items. In this work, we present the first on-Device Integrated Re-ranking framework, DIR, to avoid delays in processing real-time user behaviors. DIR includes a multi-sequence behavior modeling module to extract the user's source-level preferences, and a preference-adaptive re-ranking module to incorporate personalized source-level preferences into the re-ranking of candidate items. Besides, we design exposure loss and utility loss to jointly optimize exposure fairness and overall utility. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that DIR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in utility-based and fairness-based metrics.