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Fangye Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Fangye Wang.

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SPAR: Enhancing Industrial-Scale Generative POI Recommendation via Real-World Spatial Perception

Generative Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, autoregressively generating a target POI's semantic ID (SID), holds great promise for Location-Based Services, where a recommendation helps only if the user can reach it. Yet, existing methods operate within an interest space defined by behavior sequences and collaborative signals, where geography enters only as a textual attribute of the SID, leaving no explicit mechanism to learn or preserve how urban places are related by distance, direction, and reachability; their predictions are thus behaviorally plausible yet far from the user's real-time location. We argue that such services require injecting real urban spatial knowledge into the interest space, rather than inferring geography from behavior alone. Hence, we propose SPAR, a unified framework whose three synergistic stages jointly construct, cultivate, and preserve urban spatial knowledge: (1) at the tokenization level, Spatially-Intrinsic SID (SI-SID) explicitly encodes longitude--latitude coordinates into a sinusoidal geospatial embedding and fuses it with the textual semantic embedding, producing identifiers via RQ-Kmeans that are simultaneously semantically and geographically consistent; (2) at the cognition level, Multi-Granular Geospatial CPT (MG-CPT) continually pre-trains the base LLM on 25 curated geospatial datasets organized into three tiers of basic attributes, pairwise relations, and city-scale navigation, so that scattered POIs cohere into a connected urban space; and (3) at the adaptation level, Task-Vector Anchored SFT (TV-SFT) anchors the acquired spatial knowledge as a frozen parameter-space task vector to prevent its catastrophic forgetting during behavioral fine-tuning, thereby fusing the two spaces. Extensive quantitative and visualization experiments on two public and four industrial-scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SPAR.

cs.IR

HF-SID: High-Fidelity Semantic IDs for Generative Retrieval in Location-Based Services

Generative retrieval has attracted increasing attention in Location-Based Services (LBS), where each Point-of-Interest (POI) is represented as a Semantic ID (SID). As the SID is the only channel through which POI information reaches the generative model, whatever it fails to preserve is irrecoverable at decoding time, and LBS retrieval is especially sensitive to the fine-grained differences that existing SIDs blur. Specifically, (1) LLMs embed continuous coordinates discontinuously, so their numeric differences do not reflect true geographic distance; (2) dynamic numerical attributes differ vastly in scale, so an identical gap may be decisive for one attribute yet negligible for another; and (3) short text cannot convey hierarchical affiliation, as text-similar POIs may belong to different hierarchies. We therefore propose HF-SID, which restores geographic, numerical, and structural fidelity at the representation stage, before any information is committed to a discrete code. It transforms coordinates into a continuous 3D Cartesian form and encodes each numerical value as a single unit, consolidated inside the LLM by Geo-CPT and Num-CPT with type-aware embeddings; a Structure-based Contrastive Learning objective, applied only to the last-layer residual, then separates co-located POIs that share a coarse tag but differ at the fine level. Because these mechanisms enrich the representation rather than lengthen the identifier, HF-SID uses a 3-token SID at no extra decoding cost. On a large-scale industrial

cs.IR

GeoGR: Enabling Spatio-Temporal Aware Industrial-scale Generative POI Recommendations

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) prediction is a fundamental task in location-based services (LBS), especially critical for large-scale navigation platforms such as AMAP that serve billions of users in diverse lifestyle scenarios. Although recent POI recommendation approaches based on SIDs have achieved promising performance, they struggle in complex, sparse real-world environments due to two key limitations: (1) inadequate modeling of high-quality SIDs that capture cross-category spatio-temporal collaborative relationships, and (2) poor alignment between large language models (LLMs) and the POI recommendation task. To this end, we propose GeoGR, a geographic generative recommendation framework tailored for navigation-based LBS like AMAP, which perceives changes in users' contextual states and enables spatio-temporal aware POI recommendation. GeoGR features a two-stage design: (i) a geo-aware SID tokenization pipeline that explicitly learns spatio-temporal collaborative semantic representations via geographically constrained co-visited POI pairs, contrastive semantic representation learning, and iterative refinement; and (ii) a multi-stage LLM training strategy that aligns non-native SID tokens through continued pre-training with multiple prompt templates and enables autoregressive POI generation via supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate GeoGR superiority over state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the deployment on the large-scale AMAP platform over three months, serving millions of users and delivering significant online gains of +2.91% in WINRATE and +5.55% in PV_CTR, confirms its practical effectiveness and scalability in production.

cs.IR

HeMix: Scaling Industrial Ranking Models with Heterogeneous Token Mixing

Scaling up ranking models for industrial recommender systems faces two critical challenges: (C1) existing sequence tokenization fails to jointly capture context-aware and context-invariant user intent from heterogeneous behavior sources, and (C2) prevailing interaction mechanisms are both computationally expensive and semantically homogeneous, limiting prediction quality under strict online latency constraints. We propose \textbf{HeMix}, a scalable ranking model that unifies query-mixed sequence tokenization with heterogeneous feature interaction. To address (C1), HeMix introduces a \textit{Query-Mixed Interest Extraction} module that employs dynamic and fixed queries to simultaneously model context-aware and context-invariant interests from global and real-time behavior sequences. To address (C2), we design the \textit{HeteroMixer} block, comprising Multi-Head Token Fusion, Heterogeneous Mixed-Token Interaction and Group-Aligned Reconstruction, as an efficient alternative to self-attention that enables multi-granularity cross-feature modeling at linear cost. Crucially, HeMix scales smoothly from ${\sim}100$M to ${\sim}1500$M parameters by independently expanding block depth and token dimension, yielding steady accuracy gains without architectural redesign. Experiments on industrial-scale data show that HeMix achieves $+1.64\%$ relative CTR-AUC over the DLRM baseline at the ${\sim}100$M scale while requiring fewer GFLOPs than the strongest competitor. Deployed on the AMAP APP, HeMix yields +0.88\% GMV, +2.74\% PV\_CTR and +0.84\% UV\_CVR over the production baseline in online A/B tests.

cs.IR

A Comprehensive Summarization and Evaluation of Feature Refinement Modules for CTR Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is widely used in academia and industry. Most CTR tasks fall into a feature embedding \& feature interaction paradigm, where the accuracy of CTR prediction is mainly improved by designing practical feature interaction structures. However, recent studies have argued that the fixed feature embedding learned only through the embedding layer limits the performance of existing CTR models. Some works apply extra modules on top of the embedding layer to dynamically refine feature representations in different instances, making it effective and easy to integrate with existing CTR methods. Despite the promising results, there is a lack of a systematic review and summarization of this new promising direction on the CTR task. To fill this gap, we comprehensively summarize and define a new module, namely \textbf{feature refinement} (FR) module, that can be applied between feature embedding and interaction layers. We extract 14 FR modules from previous works, including instances where the FR module was proposed but not clearly defined or explained. We fully assess the effectiveness and compatibility of existing FR modules through comprehensive and extensive experiments with over 200 augmented models and over 4,000 runs for more than 15,000 GPU hours. The results offer insightful guidelines for researchers, and all benchmarking code and experimental results are open-sourced. In addition, we present a new architecture of assigning independent FR modules to separate sub-networks for parallel CTR models, as opposed to the conventional method of inserting a shared FR module on top of the embedding layer. Our approach is also supported by comprehensive experiments demonstrating its effectiveness.

cs.IR

Towards Deeper, Lighter and Interpretable Cross Network for CTR Prediction

Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction plays an essential role in recommender systems and online advertising. It is crucial to effectively model feature interactions to improve the prediction performance of CTR models. However, existing methods face three significant challenges. First, while most methods can automatically capture high-order feature interactions, their performance tends to diminish as the order of feature interactions increases. Second, existing methods lack the ability to provide convincing interpretations of the prediction results, especially for high-order feature interactions, which limits the trustworthiness of their predictions. Third, many methods suffer from the presence of redundant parameters, particularly in the embedding layer. This paper proposes a novel method called Gated Deep Cross Network (GDCN) and a Field-level Dimension Optimization (FDO) approach to address these challenges. As the core structure of GDCN, Gated Cross Network (GCN) captures explicit high-order feature interactions and dynamically filters important interactions with an information gate in each order. Additionally, we use the FDO approach to learn condensed dimensions for each field based on their importance. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, superiority and interpretability of GDCN. Moreover, we verify the effectiveness of FDO in learning various dimensions and reducing model parameters. The code is available on \url{https://github.com/anonctr/GDCN}.

cs.IR

CL4CTR: A Contrastive Learning Framework for CTR Prediction

Many Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction works focused on designing advanced architectures to model complex feature interactions but neglected the importance of feature representation learning, e.g., adopting a plain embedding layer for each feature, which results in sub-optimal feature representations and thus inferior CTR prediction performance. For instance, low frequency features, which account for the majority of features in many CTR tasks, are less considered in standard supervised learning settings, leading to sub-optimal feature representations. In this paper, we introduce self-supervised learning to produce high-quality feature representations directly and propose a model-agnostic Contrastive Learning for CTR (CL4CTR) framework consisting of three self-supervised learning signals to regularize the feature representation learning: contrastive loss, feature alignment, and field uniformity. The contrastive module first constructs positive feature pairs by data augmentation and then minimizes the distance between the representations of each positive feature pair by the contrastive loss. The feature alignment constraint forces the representations of features from the same field to be close, and the field uniformity constraint forces the representations of features from different fields to be distant. Extensive experiments verify that CL4CTR achieves the best performance on four datasets and has excellent effectiveness and compatibility with various representative baselines.

cs.IR

Enhancing CTR Prediction with Context-Aware Feature Representation Learning

CTR prediction has been widely used in the real world. Many methods model feature interaction to improve their performance. However, most methods only learn a fixed representation for each feature without considering the varying importance of each feature under different contexts, resulting in inferior performance. Recently, several methods tried to learn vector-level weights for feature representations to address the fixed representation issue. However, they only produce linear transformations to refine the fixed feature representations, which are still not flexible enough to capture the varying importance of each feature under different contexts. In this paper, we propose a novel module named Feature Refinement Network (FRNet), which learns context-aware feature representations at bit-level for each feature in different contexts. FRNet consists of two key components: 1) Information Extraction Unit (IEU), which captures contextual information and cross-feature relationships to guide context-aware feature refinement; and 2) Complementary Selection Gate (CSGate), which adaptively integrates the original and complementary feature representations learned in IEU with bit-level weights. Notably, FRNet is orthogonal to existing CTR methods and thus can be applied in many existing methods to boost their performance. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility of FRNet.

cs.IR