用大模型零训练补全冷门房源推荐,不降老热门体验。
Serving the Long Tail: Training-Free LLM Candidate Generation for Vacation Rental Marketplaces
- 不依赖用户行为,仅用房源元数据和预训练模型生成候选
- 覆盖超十万无候选房源,长尾推荐效果提升显著
- 适合大规模房源平台部署,可替代昂贵API模型
度假租赁平台存在供给端结构性失衡:少数房源获得大量用户交互,而大量新、小众及季节性房源缺乏行为信号,难以通过协同过滤有效推荐。在Vrbo中,基于物品的K近邻(IBKNN)是核心候选生成方式,但无法为数万套房源生成候选,且对稀疏交互房源的邻域表现弱。本文提出一种无需训练的LLM候选生成流程,仅使用静态房源元数据。通过现成大模型为每套房源生成多样化语义查询,再由预训练文本编码器嵌入,借助近似最近邻索引从1170万房源库中召回候选。采用并集融合策略将新候选与IBKNN结果合并,保持行为通道排序,确保优质房源不受影响,下游学习排序模型对融合池重新打分。在160万核心房源上评估显示,系统将候选覆盖率扩展至数万套原无法触达的房源,在长尾段落收益最大,且在共享房源上所有K值均持平或优于IBKNN。下游排序进一步提升融合池性能,构建出完整候选生成与重排体系,服务长尾同时不损害热门房源。此外,验证并集融合使30亿参数开源模型与前沿API模型的召回差距从27%-46%缩小至1%以下,支持在平台规模下自托管小型模型部署。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vacation rental marketplaces face a structural imbalance on the supply side: a small fraction of properties receive most user interactions, while the long tail of new, niche, and seasonal listings generates too little behavioral signal for collaborative filtering to serve effectively. At Vrbo, item-based k-nearest neighbors (IBKNN) is a core candidate generation channel, but leaves tens of thousands of properties with no candidates and produces weak neighborhoods for sparsely interacted ones. We present a training-free, LLM-based candidate generation pipeline that complements IBKNN using static property metadata alone. An off-the-shelf LLM synthesizes diverse semantic queries per property, a pre-trained text encoder embeds them, and an approximate nearest-neighbor index retrieves candidates from an 11.7M-property catalog. A Union fusion strategy merges these with IBKNN while preserving the behavioral channel's ordering, guaranteeing no degradation on well-served properties, and a downstream learning-to-rank model re-scores the fused pool. Evaluated on 1.6M focal properties, the system extends candidate coverage to tens of thousands of properties IBKNN cannot reach, delivers its largest gains on the long-tail segment where behavioral methods are weakest, and matches or beats IBKNN at every K on shared properties. A downstream learning-to-rank stage further lifts the fused pool, yielding a complete candidate generation and re-ranking stack that serves the long tail without regressing well-served properties. We additionally show that Union fusion collapses the recall gap between a 3B open-weights LLM and frontier API-based models from 27-46% to under 1%, supporting self-hosted small-model deployment at marketplace catalog scale.
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