提出自适应预排序框架,解决样本异质性导致的训练低效问题。
Not All Candidates are Created Equal: A Heterogeneity-Aware Approach to Pre-ranking in Recommender Systems
- 按难易分离样本,分路径优化,缓解梯度冲突。
- 轻量模型覆盖全部候选,强模型聚焦难点,提升效率与效果。
- 工业部署9个月,性能提升0.4%用户时长,无额外算力成本。
大规模推荐系统通常采用多阶段流水线:召回、预排序、排序和重排序。预排序阶段面临的核心挑战源于来自粗粒度召回结果、细粒度排序信号及曝光反馈的训练样本异质性。分析表明,现有预排序方法混合使用异质样本,导致梯度冲突:困难样本主导训练,简单样本被忽略,影响模型性能。同时,对所有样本统一增加模型复杂度效率低下,对简单样本过度消耗计算资源且收益有限。为此,本文提出异质性感知自适应预排序(HAP)框架,通过敏感采样与定制化损失设计缓解梯度冲突,并动态分配计算预算。HAP将样本分离为易/难两类,分别采用轻量与强模型进行优化。首先用轻量模型高效覆盖全部候选,再对难例启用更强模型,在保证精度的同时降低开销。该方法不仅提升预排序效果,也为工业级系统提供可扩展策略。已在今日头条生产系统上线9个月,带来最高0.4%的用户应用使用时长提升和0.05%的活跃天数增长,无需额外计算成本。同时发布大规模工业混合样本数据集,支持对预排序中源驱动异质性的系统研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Most large-scale recommender systems follow a multi-stage cascade of retrieval, pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking. A key challenge at the pre-ranking stage arises from the heterogeneity of training instances sampled from coarse-grained retrieval results, fine-grained ranking signals, and exposure feedback. Our analysis reveals that prevailing pre-ranking methods, which indiscriminately mix heterogeneous samples, suffer from gradient conflicts: hard samples dominate training while easy ones remain underutilized, leading to suboptimal performance. We further show that the common practice of uniformly scaling model complexity across all samples is inefficient, as it overspends computation on easy cases and slows training without proportional gains. To address these limitations, this paper presents Heterogeneity-Aware Adaptive Pre-ranking (HAP), a unified framework that mitigates gradient conflicts through conflict-sensitive sampling coupled with tailored loss design, while adaptively allocating computational budgets across candidates. Specifically, HAP disentangles easy and hard samples, directing each subset along dedicated optimization paths. Building on this separation, it first applies lightweight models to all candidates for efficient coverage, and further engages stronger models on the hard ones, maintaining accuracy while reducing cost. This approach not only improves pre-ranking effectiveness but also provides a practical perspective on scaling strategies in industrial recommender systems. HAP has been deployed in the Toutiao production system for 9 months, yielding up to 0.4% improvement in user app usage duration and 0.05% in active days, without additional computational cost. We also release a large-scale industrial hybrid-sample dataset to enable the systematic study of source-driven candidate heterogeneity in pre-ranking.
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