Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> Deep networks have been successfully applied to unsupervised feature learning for single modalities (e.g., text, images or audio). In this work, we propose a novel application of deep networks to learn features over multiple modalities. We present a series of tasks for multimodal learning and show how to train deep networks that learn features to address these tasks. In particular, we demonstrate cross modality feature learning, where better features for one modality (e.g., video) can be learned if multiple modalities (e.g., audio and video) are present at feature learning time. Furthermore, we show how to learn a shared representation between modalities and evaluate it on a unique task, where the classifier is trained with audio-only data but tested with video-only data and vice-versa. Our models are validated on the CUAVE and AVLetters datasets on audio-visual speech classification, demonstrating best published visual speech classification on AVLetters and effective shared representation learning. <s> BIB001 </s> Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> Sponsored search represents a major source of revenue for web search engines. This popular advertising model brings a unique possibility for advertisers to target users' immediate intent communicated through a search query, usually by displaying their ads alongside organic search results for queries deemed relevant to their products or services. However, due to a large number of unique queries it is challenging for advertisers to identify all such relevant queries. For this reason search engines often provide a service of advanced matching, which automatically finds additional relevant queries for advertisers to bid on. We present a novel advanced matching approach based on the idea of semantic embeddings of queries and ads. The embeddings were learned using a large data set of user search sessions, consisting of search queries, clicked ads and search links, while utilizing contextual information such as dwell time and skipped ads. To address the large-scale nature of our problem, both in terms of data and vocabulary size, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for training of the embeddings. Finally, we present an approach for overcoming a cold-start problem associated with new ads and queries. We report results of editorial evaluation and online tests on actual search traffic. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in terms of relevance, coverage, and incremental revenue. Lastly, we open-source learned query embeddings to be used by researchers in computational advertising and related fields. <s> BIB002 </s> Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> Building effective recommender systems for domains like fashion is challenging due to the high level of subjectivity and the semantic complexity of the features involved (i.e., fashion styles). Recent work has shown that approaches to `visual' recommendation (e.g.~clothing, art, etc.) can be made more accurate by incorporating visual signals directly into the recommendation objective, using `off-the-shelf' feature representations derived from deep networks. Here, we seek to extend this contribution by showing that recommendation performance can be significantly improved by learning `fashion aware' image representations directly, i.e., by training the image representation (from the pixel level) and the recommender system jointly; this contribution is related to recent work using Siamese CNNs, though we are able to show improvements over state-of-the-art recommendation techniques such as BPR and variants that make use of pre-trained visual features. Furthermore, we show that our model can be used \emph{generatively}, i.e., given a user and a product category, we can generate new images (i.e., clothing items) that are most consistent with their personal taste. This represents a first step towards building systems that go beyond recommending existing items from a product corpus, but which can be used to suggest styles and aid the design of new products. <s> BIB003 </s> Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> Tasks such as search and recommendation have become increasingly important for E-commerce to deal with the information overload problem. To meet the diverse needs of different users, personalization plays an important role. In many large portals such as Taobao and Amazon, there are a bunch of different types of search and recommendation tasks operating simultaneously for personalization. However, most of current techniques address each task separately. This is suboptimal as no information about users shared across different tasks. In this work, we propose to learn universal user representations across multiple tasks for more effective personalization. In particular, user behavior sequences (e.g., click, bookmark or purchase of products) are modeled by LSTM and attention mechanism by integrating all the corresponding content, behavior and temporal information. User representations are shared and learned in an end-to-end setting across multiple tasks. Benefiting from better information utilization of multiple tasks, the user representations are more effective to reflect their interests and are more general to be transferred to new tasks. We refer this work as Deep User Perception Network (DUPN) and conduct an extensive set of offline and online experiments. Across all tested five different tasks, our DUPN consistently achieves better results by giving more effective user representations. Moreover, we deploy DUPN in large scale operational tasks in Taobao. Detailed implementations, e.g., incremental model updating, are also provided to address the practical issues for the real world applications. <s> BIB004 </s> Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> Recommender systems (RSs) have been the most important technology for increasing the business in Taobao, the largest online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform in China. There are three major challenges facing RS in Taobao: scalability, sparsity and cold start. In this paper, we present our technical solutions to address these three challenges. The methods are based on a well-known graph embedding framework. We first construct an item graph from users' behavior history, and learn the embeddings of all items in the graph. The item embeddings are employed to compute pairwise similarities between all items, which are then used in the recommendation process. To alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems, side information is incorporated into the graph embedding framework. We propose two aggregation methods to integrate the embeddings of items and the corresponding side information. Experimental results from offline experiments show that methods incorporating side information are superior to those that do not. Further, we describe the platform upon which the embedding methods are deployed and the workflow to process the billion-scale data in Taobao. Using A/B test, we show that the online Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) are improved comparing to the previous collaborative filtering based methods widely used in Taobao, further demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed methods in Taobao's live production environment. <s> BIB005 </s> Production Ranking Systems: A Review <s> Multi Modal Representations <s> E-commerce sponsored search contributes an important part of revenue for the e-commerce company. In consideration of effectiveness and efficiency, a large-scale sponsored search system commonly adopts a multi-stage architecture. We name these stages as ad retrieval, ad pre-ranking and ad ranking. Ad retrieval and ad pre-ranking are collectively referred to as ad matching in this paper. We propose an end-to-end neural matching framework (EENMF) to model two tasks---vector-based ad retrieval and neural networks based ad pre-ranking. Under the deep matching framework, vector-based ad retrieval harnesses user recent behavior sequence to retrieve relevant ad candidates without the constraint of keyword bidding. Simultaneously, the deep model is employed to perform the global pre-ranking of ad candidates from multiple retrieval paths effectively and efficiently. Besides, the proposed model tries to optimize the pointwise cross-entropy loss which is consistent with the objective of predict models in the ranking stage. We conduct extensive evaluation to validate the performance of the proposed framework. In the real traffic of a large-scale e-commerce sponsored search, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline. <s> BIB006
User interaction, text based side information and image based side information are each distinct datasets from various sources that follow distinct distributions. ey are, however, related in that they express information about the same items. To simultaneously leverage all datasets and learn a single representation ranking systems employ multimodal learning BIB001 . e simplest approach to this end is concatenation of raw vectors to generate a single input to a model which learns a representation BIB004 . Although simple, this method fails to take advantage of the separate structures within each modality. Another approach is to train separate embedding layers for each modality and use these as input to another model which learns a combined embedding. is methodology allows separate architectures to be employed for each modality BIB005 , but adds complexity in that the individual architectures have no obvious method of validation. Furthermore if one modality of data is not present for an item, this could cause unexpected results in the nal representation. Extensions to this method train separate embeddings for each modality but with a cost function used across the separate models to force them to map to the same space BIB005 . Items can then be taken as a weighted sum of the embeddings of their associated data points. is method allows for items with incomplete side information. Mapping modalities to the same embedding space can also be performed in a the methodology of search2 ec BIB002 , in which vectors built from side information are rst initialized to the corresponding user action vectors. Side information is then sampled to form n-grams which are subsequently embedded into the same space as the user action vectors, and only those within a minimum cosine similarity to the user action vector are kept. Embeddings can be trained jointly over modalities, by employing siamese networks BIB003 , or by allowing certain subgraphs within a network share weights BIB006 . In these architectures side information is used as features to learn supervised embeddings with the user interactions providing the relevance to encode within the space. is methodology introduces training and architectural complexities but provides powerful representations.