arXiv:2505.04434cs.IRstat.ML2025-05被引 1

提出统一架构LT-TTD,解决推荐系统两级排序的误差传播问题。

Theoretical Guarantees for LT-TTD: A Unified Transformer-based Architecture for Two-Level Ranking Systems

  • 用双塔蒸馏融合检索与排序,实现列表级联合学习。
  • 理论证明可降低不可达相关项上限,提升排名质量。
  • 适合需要高效高精度排序的工业推荐系统场景。

现代推荐与搜索系统普遍采用多阶段排序架构以应对数十亿候选对象。传统方法使用独立的L1(候选召回)和L2(重排)模型,优化目标不同,导致关键缺陷如不可逆误差传播和次优排序。本文分析了这种解耦范式的根本局限,并提出LT-TTD(Listwise Transformer with Two-Tower Distillation)——一种统一的Transformer架构,连接检索与排序阶段。该方法结合双塔模型的计算效率与Transformer的表达能力,在统一的列表级学习框架下实现端到端优化。我们提供了全面的理论分析,建立关于误差传播缓解、排序质量提升和优化收敛性的形式化保证。推导出理论边界表明,LT-TTD将不可达相关项的上界降低了一个与知识蒸馏强度相关的因子;并证明多目标优化框架优于分离训练的全局最优解。此外,我们分析了算法的计算复杂度,表明其渐近复杂度仍处于实际应用的可接受范围。我们还引入了UPQE这一新型评估指标,专为统一排序架构设计,综合衡量召回质量、排序性能与计算效率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Modern recommendation and search systems typically employ multi-stage ranking architectures to efficiently handle billions of candidates. The conventional approach uses distinct L1 (candidate retrieval) and L2 (re-ranking) models with different optimization objectives, introducing critical limitations including irreversible error propagation and suboptimal ranking. This paper identifies and analyzes the fundamental limitations of this decoupled paradigm and proposes LT-TTD (Listwise Transformer with Two-Tower Distillation), a novel unified architecture that bridges retrieval and ranking phases. Our approach combines the computational efficiency of two-tower models with the expressivity of transformers in a unified listwise learning framework. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of our architecture and establish formal guarantees regarding error propagation mitigation, ranking quality improvements, and optimization convergence. We derive theoretical bounds showing that LT-TTD reduces the upper limit on irretrievable relevant items by a factor that depends on the knowledge distillation strength, and prove that our multi-objective optimization framework achieves a provably better global optimum than disjoint training. Additionally, we analyze the computational complexity of our approach, demonstrating that the asymptotic complexity remains within practical bounds for real-world applications. We also introduce UPQE, a novel evaluation metric specifically designed for unified ranking architectures that holistically captures retrieval quality, ranking performance, and computational efficiency.

推荐系统双塔模型理论保证排序优化

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