Shuzhi Cao
Publications
PRECTR-V2:Unified Relevance-CTR Framework with Cross-User Preference Mining, Exposure Bias Correction, and LLM-Distilled Encoder Optimization
In search systems, effectively coordinating the two core objectives of search relevance matching and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for discovering users' interests and enhancing platform revenue. In our prior work PRECTR, we proposed a unified framework to integrate these two subtasks,thereby eliminating their inconsistency and leading to mutual benefit.However, our previous work still faces three main challenges. First, low-active users and new users have limited search behavioral data, making it difficult to achieve effective personalized relevance preference modeling. Second, training data for ranking models predominantly come from high-relevance exposures, creating a distribution mismatch with the broader candidate space in coarse-ranking, leading to generalization bias. Third, due to the latency constraint, the original model employs an Emb+MLP architecture with a frozen BERT encoder, which prevents joint optimization and creates misalignment between representation learning and CTR fine-tuning. To solve these issues, we further reinforce our method and propose PRECTR-V2. Specifically, we mitigate the low-activity users' sparse behavior problem by mining global relevance preferences under the specific query, which facilitates effective personalized relevance modeling for cold-start scenarios. Subsequently, we construct hard negative samples through embedding noise injection and relevance label reconstruction, and optimize their relative ranking against positive samples via pairwise loss, thereby correcting exposure bias. Finally, we pretrain a lightweight transformer-based encoder via knowledge distillation from LLM and SFT on the text relevance classification task. This encoder replaces the frozen BERT module, enabling better adaptation to CTR fine-tuning and advancing beyond the traditional Emb+MLP paradigm.
DAIAN: Deep Adaptive Intent-Aware Network for CTR Prediction in Trigger-Induced Recommendation
Recommendation systems are essential for personalizing e-commerce shopping experiences. Among these, Trigger-Induced Recommendation (TIR) has emerged as a key scenario, which utilizes a trigger item (explicitly represents a user's instantaneous interest), enabling precise, real-time recommendations. Although several trigger-based techniques have been proposed, most of them struggle to address the intent myopia issue, that is, a recommendation system overemphasizes the role of trigger items and narrowly focuses on suggesting commodities that are highly relevant to trigger items. Meanwhile, existing methods rely on collaborative behavior patterns between trigger and recommended items to identify the user's preferences, yet the sparsity of ID-based interaction restricts their effectiveness. To this end, we propose the Deep Adaptive Intent-Aware Network (DAIAN) that dynamically adapts to users' intent preferences. In general, we first extract the users' personalized intent representations by analyzing the correlation between a user's click and the trigger item, and accordingly retrieve the user's related historical behaviors to mine the user's diverse intent. Besides, sparse collaborative behaviors constrain the performance in capturing items associated with user intent. Hence, we reinforce similarity by leveraging a hybrid enhancer with ID and semantic information, followed by adaptive selection based on varying intents. Experimental results on public datasets and our industrial e-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DAIAN.