arXiv subjects

Alireza Vahdatpour

Publications and source records attributed to Alireza Vahdatpour.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MISO: Model-Internal-State-Guided Optimization for Ranking Models

Ranking models are repeatedly refined within established model families, yet the choice of which component to scale, replace, or retire is often guided by expensive trial-and-error. We present Model Internal State Optimization (MISO), a systems workflow that uses model internal states (MIS), including parameters, activations, gradients, and normalization statistics, to prioritize such local optimization decisions. MISO extracts MIS from a trained ranking model, aggregates them into ranking, alignment, and comparison signals, and converts those signals into a small set of interpretable candidate edits. Because MIS are re-extracted after each retraining cycle, MISO naturally supports an adaptive optimization workflow that tracks evolving model behavior as data distributions and system requirements shift over time. In an ads ranking case study, MISO improves normalized entropy while requiring substantially fewer validation runs than expert-driven and black-box scaling workflows, offering a practical middle ground between manual tuning and opaque automated search.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Design Once, Deploy at Scale: Template-Driven ML Development for Large Model Ecosystems

Modern computational advertising platforms typically rely on recommendation systems to predict user responses, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and other optimization events. To support a wide variety of product surfaces and advertiser goals, these platforms frequently maintain an extensive ecosystem of machine learning (ML) models. However, operating at this scale creates significant development and efficiency challenges. Substantial engineering effort is required to regularly refresh ML models and propagate new techniques, which results in long latencies when deploying ML innovations across the ecosystem. We present a large-scale empirical study comparing model performance, efficiency, and ML technique propagation between a standardized model-building approach and independent per-model optimization in recommendation systems. To facilitate this standardization, we propose the Standard Model Template (SMT) -- a framework that generates high-performance models adaptable to diverse data distributions and optimization events. By utilizing standardized, composable ML model components, SMT reduces technique propagation complexity from $O(n \cdot 2^k)$ to $O(n + k)$ where $n$ is the number of models and $k$ the number of techniques. Evaluating an extensive suite of models over four global development cycles within Meta's production ads ranking ecosystem, our results demonstrate: (1) a 0.63% average improvement in cross-entropy at neutral serving capacity, (2) a 92% reduction in per-model iteration engineering time, and (3) a $6.3\times$ increase in technique-model pair adoption throughput. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that diverse optimization goals inherently require diversified ML model design.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

External Large Foundation Model: How to Efficiently Serve Trillions of Parameters for Online Ads Recommendation

Ads recommendation is a prominent service of online advertising systems and has been actively studied. Recent studies indicate that scaling-up and advanced design of the recommendation model can bring significant performance improvement. However, with a larger model scale, such prior studies have a significantly increasing gap from industry as they often neglect two fundamental challenges in industrial-scale applications. First, training and inference budgets are restricted for the model to be served, exceeding which may incur latency and impair user experience. Second, large-volume data arrive in a streaming mode with data distributions dynamically shifting, as new users/ads join and existing users/ads leave the system. We propose the External Large Foundation Model (ExFM) framework to address the overlooked challenges. Specifically, we develop external distillation and a data augmentation system (DAS) to control the computational cost of training/inference while maintaining high performance. We design the teacher in a way like a foundation model (FM) that can serve multiple students as vertical models (VMs) to amortize its building cost. We propose Auxiliary Head and Student Adapter to mitigate the data distribution gap between FM and VMs caused by the streaming data issue. Comprehensive experiments on internal industrial-scale applications and public datasets demonstrate significant performance gain by ExFM.

cs.IR↗