arXiv subjects

Huasen Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Huasen Wu.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Decoupled Entity Representation Learning for Pinterest Ads Ranking

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework following an upstream-downstream paradigm to construct user and item (Pin) embeddings from diverse data sources, which are essential for Pinterest to deliver personalized Pins and ads effectively. Our upstream models are trained on extensive data sources featuring varied signals, utilizing complex architectures to capture intricate relationships between users and Pins on Pinterest. To ensure scalability of the upstream models, entity embeddings are learned, and regularly refreshed, rather than real-time computation, allowing for asynchronous interaction between the upstream and downstream models. These embeddings are then integrated as input features in numerous downstream tasks, including ad retrieval and ranking models for CTR and CVR predictions. We demonstrate that our framework achieves notable performance improvements in both offline and online settings across various downstream tasks. This framework has been deployed in Pinterest's production ad ranking systems, resulting in significant gains in online metrics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Faceted Large Embedding Tables for Pinterest Ads Ranking

Large embedding tables are indispensable in modern recommendation systems, thanks to their ability to effectively capture and memorize intricate details of interactions among diverse entities. As we explore integrating large embedding tables into Pinterest's ads ranking models, we encountered not only common challenges such as sparsity and scalability, but also several obstacles unique to our context. Notably, our initial attempts to train large embedding tables from scratch resulted in neutral metrics. To tackle this, we introduced a novel multi-faceted pretraining scheme that incorporates multiple pretraining algorithms. This approach greatly enriched the embedding tables and resulted in significant performance improvements. As a result, the multi-faceted large embedding tables bring great performance gain on both the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) domains. Moreover, we designed a CPU-GPU hybrid serving infrastructure to overcome GPU memory limits and elevate the scalability. This framework has been deployed in the Pinterest Ads system and achieved 1.34% online CPC reduction and 2.60% CTR increase with neutral end-to-end latency change.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Waiting but not Aging: Optimizing Information Freshness Under the Pull Model

The Age-of-Information is an important metric for investigating the timeliness performance in information-update systems. In this paper, we study the AoI minimization problem under a new Pull model with replication schemes, where a user proactively sends a replicated request to multiple servers to "pull" the information of interest. Interestingly, we find that under this new Pull model, replication schemes capture a novel tradeoff between different values of the AoI across the servers (due to the random updating processes) and different response times across the servers, which can be exploited to minimize the expected AoI at the user's side. Specifically, assuming Poisson updating process for the servers and exponentially distributed response time, we derive a closed-form formula for computing the expected AoI and obtain the optimal number of responses to wait for to minimize the expected AoI. Then, we extend our analysis to the setting where the user aims to maximize the AoI-based utility, which represents the user's satisfaction level with respect to the freshness of the received information. Furthermore, we consider a more realistic scenario where the user has no prior knowledge of the system. In this case, we reformulate the utility maximization problem as a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit problem with side observations and leverage a special linear structure of side observations to design learning algorithms with improved performance guarantees. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to elucidate our theoretical results and compare the performance of different algorithms. Our findings reveal that under the Pull model, waiting does not necessarily lead to aging; waiting for more than one response can often significantly reduce the AoI and improve the AoI-based utility in most scenarios.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Should I send this notification? Optimizing push notifications decision making by modeling the future

Most recommender systems are myopic, that is they optimize based on the immediate response of the user. This may be misaligned with the true objective, such as creating long term user satisfaction. In this work we focus on mobile push notifications, where the long term effects of recommender system decisions can be particularly strong. For example, sending too many or irrelevant notifications may annoy a user and cause them to disable notifications. However, a myopic system will always choose to send a notification since negative effects occur in the future. This is typically mitigated using heuristics. However, heuristics can be hard to reason about or improve, require retuning each time the system is changed, and may be suboptimal. To counter these drawbacks, there is significant interest in recommender systems that optimize directly for long-term value (LTV). Here, we describe a method for maximising LTV by using model-based reinforcement learning (RL) to make decisions about whether to send push notifications. We model the effects of sending a notification on the user's future behavior. Much of the prior work applying RL to maximise LTV in recommender systems has focused on session-based optimization, while the time horizon for notification decision making in this work extends over several days. We test this approach in an A/B test on a major social network. We show that by optimizing decisions about push notifications we are able to send less notifications and obtain a higher open rate than the baseline system, while generating the same level of user engagement on the platform as the existing, heuristic-based, system.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Learning to Rank For Push Notifications Using Pairwise Expected Regret

Listwise ranking losses have been widely studied in recommender systems. However, new paradigms of content consumption present new challenges for ranking methods. In this work we contribute an analysis of learning to rank for personalized mobile push notifications and discuss the unique challenges this presents compared to traditional ranking problems. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel ranking loss based on weighting the pairwise loss between candidates by the expected regret incurred for misordering the pair. We demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform prior methods both in a simulated environment and in a production experiment on a major social network.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

Adaptive Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff for Opportunistic Bandits

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic bandits - a new variant of bandits where the regret of pulling a suboptimal arm varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or produce price. When the load/price is low, so is the cost/regret of pulling a suboptimal arm (e.g., trying a suboptimal network configuration). Therefore, intuitively, we could explore more when the load/price is low and exploit more when the load/price is high. Inspired by this intuition, we propose an Adaptive Upper-Confidence-Bound (AdaUCB) algorithm to adaptively balance the exploration-exploitation tradeoff for opportunistic bandits. We prove that AdaUCB achieves $O(\log T)$ regret with a smaller coefficient than the traditional UCB algorithm. Furthermore, AdaUCB achieves $O(1)$ regret with respect to $T$ if the exploration cost is zero when the load level is below a certain threshold. Last, based on both synthetic data and real-world traces, experimental results show that AdaUCB significantly outperforms other bandit algorithms, such as UCB and TS (Thompson Sampling), under large load/price fluctuations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Double Thompson Sampling for Dueling Bandits

In this paper, we propose a Double Thompson Sampling (D-TS) algorithm for dueling bandit problems. As indicated by its name, D-TS selects both the first and the second candidates according to Thompson Sampling. Specifically, D-TS maintains a posterior distribution for the preference matrix, and chooses the pair of arms for comparison by sampling twice from the posterior distribution. This simple algorithm applies to general Copeland dueling bandits, including Condorcet dueling bandits as its special case. For general Copeland dueling bandits, we show that D-TS achieves $O(K^2 \log T)$ regret. For Condorcet dueling bandits, we further simplify the D-TS algorithm and show that the simplified D-TS algorithm achieves $O(K \log T + K^2 \log \log T)$ regret. Simulation results based on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed D-TS algorithm.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2015

Algorithms with Logarithmic or Sublinear Regret for Constrained Contextual Bandits

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex coupling among contexts over time.Such coupling effects make it difficult to obtain oracle solutions that assume known statistics of bandits. To gain insight, we first study unit-cost systems with known context distribution. When the expected rewards are known, we develop an approximation of the oracle, referred to Adaptive-Linear-Programming (ALP), which achieves near-optimality and only requires the ordering of expected rewards. With these highly desirable features, we then combine ALP with the upper-confidence-bound (UCB) method in the general case where the expected rewards are unknown {\it a priori}. We show that the proposed UCB-ALP algorithm achieves logarithmic regret except for certain boundary cases. Further, we design algorithms and obtain similar regret analysis results for more general systems with unknown context distribution and heterogeneous costs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that shows how to achieve logarithmic regret in constrained contextual bandits. Moreover, this work also sheds light on the study of computationally efficient algorithms for general constrained contextual bandits.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2012

Laxity-Based Opportunistic Scheduling with Flow-Level Dynamics and Deadlines

Many data applications in the next generation cellular networks, such as content precaching and video progressive downloading, require flow-level quality of service (QoS) guarantees. One such requirement is deadline, where the transmission task needs to be completed before the application-specific time. To minimize the number of uncompleted transmission tasks, we study laxity-based scheduling policies in this paper. We propose a Less-Laxity-Higher-Possible-Rate (L$^2$HPR) policy and prove its asymptotic optimality in underloaded identical-deadline systems. The asymptotic optimality of L$^2$HPR can be applied to estimate the schedulability of a system and provide insights on the design of scheduling policies for general systems. Based on it, we propose a framework and three heuristic policies for practical systems. Simulation results demonstrate the asymptotic optimality of L$^2$HPR and performance improvement of proposed policies over greedy policies.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2012

Fast Adaptive S-ALOHA Scheme for Event-driven M2M Communications (Journal version)

Supporting massive device transmission is challenging in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. Particularly, in event-driven M2M communications, a large number of devices activate within a short period of time, which in turn causes high radio congestions and severe access delay. To address this issue, we propose a Fast Adaptive S-ALOHA (FASA) scheme for random access control of M2M communication systems with bursty traffic. Instead of the observation in a single slot, the statistics of consecutive idle and collision slots are used in FASA to accelerate the tracking process of network status which is critical for optimizing S-ALOHA systems. Using drift analysis, we design the FASA scheme such that the estimate of the backlogged devices converges fast to the true value. Furthermore, by examining the $T$-slot drifts, we prove that the proposed FASA scheme is stable as long as the average arrival rate is smaller than $e^{-1}$, in the sense that the Markov Chain derived from the scheme is geometrically ergodic. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FASA scheme outperforms traditional additive schemes such as PB-ALOHA and achieves near-optimal performance in reducing access delay. Moreover, compared to multiplicative schemes, FASA shows its robustness under heavy traffic load in addition to better delay performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2012

Fast Adaptive S-ALOHA Scheme for Event-driven Machine-to-Machine Communications

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is now playing a market-changing role in a wide range of business world. However, in event-driven M2M communications, a large number of devices activate within a short period of time, which in turn causes high radio congestions and severe access delay. To address this issue, we propose a Fast Adaptive S-ALOHA (FASA) scheme for M2M communication systems with bursty traffic. The statistics of consecutive idle and collision slots, rather than the observation in a single slot, are used in FASA to accelerate the tracking process of network status. Furthermore, the fast convergence property of FASA is guaranteed by using drift analysis. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FASA scheme achieves near-optimal performance in reducing access delay, which outperforms that of traditional additive schemes such as PB-ALOHA. Moreover, compared to multiplicative schemes, FASA shows its robustness even under heavy traffic load in addition to better delay performance.

cs.IT↗