arXiv subjects

Julie Choi

Publications and source records attributed to Julie Choi.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantizing Intent: Cross-Domain Semantic IDs from Organic Activity for Industrial Ranking

Ads click-through rate (CTR) prediction is constrained by sparse user supervision: most users engage with ads infrequently while generating dense behavioral evidence in organic surfaces such as feed. Transferring these cross-domain signals into ads ranking is difficult due to domain mismatch, serving cost, and production complexity. We introduce cross-domain user Semantic IDs (SIDs) derived from organic feed activity and show that behavioral activity richness governs cross-domain transfer quality: SIDs from user profile text yield +0.036% AUC, SIDs from an activity-tuned LLaMA-based user embedding model yield +0.107%, and SIDs from direct feed activity behavioral embeddings yield +0.213%. We further propose RQ-FSQ, a residual finite scalar quantization method that discretizes pre-trained embeddings while matching dense-embedding AUC at substantially smaller storage. Across two heterogeneous sources, RQ-FSQ matches or slightly exceeds dense source embeddings, achieving +0.351% AUC for Feed Activity at about 30x smaller storage and +0.265% AUC for Activity-Tuned LLaMA at about 280x smaller storage. We also introduce a Hierarchical Discrete Embedding module that encodes multi-level SIDs through prefix n-gram sparse embedding tables trained end-to-end under the CTR objective. In a large-scale industrial ads ranking system, cold-start segment analysis shows gains up to +1.522% for users with near-zero ad interaction history, validating cross-domain behavioral transfer as an effective bridge for sparse-history ranking.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

An Industrial-Scale Sequential Recommender for LinkedIn Feed Ranking

LinkedIn Feed enables professionals worldwide to discover relevant content, build connections, and share knowledge at scale. We present Feed Sequential Recommender (Feed SR), a transformer-based sequential ranking model for LinkedIn Feed that replaces a DCNv2-based ranker and meets strict production constraints. We detail the modeling choices, training techniques, and serving optimizations that enable deployment at a scale of 1.2 billion members. Feed SR has been serving the majority of LinkedIn's Feed traffic for over three months and shows significant improvements in member engagement (+2.10% time spent, +3.52% like, comments, or reshares) in online A/B tests compared to the existing production model. We also describe our deployment experience with alternative sequential and LLM-based ranking architectures and why Feed SR provided the best combination of online metrics and production efficiency.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Logarithmic Accuracy in Importance Sampling via Large Deviations

Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on constructing an importance measure under which the relative variance of the estimator grows sub-exponentially as the parameter increases. In practice, constructing such an estimator is not easy. In this work, we study the behavior of IS estimators under an importance measure which is not necessarily optimal using large deviations theory. This provides new insights into asymptotic efficiency of IS estimators and the required sample size. Based on the study, we also propose new diagnostics of IS for rare event simulation.

math.ST↗

arXiv2025

Large Scalable Cross-Domain Graph Neural Networks for Personalized Notification at LinkedIn

Notification recommendation systems are critical to driving user engagement on professional platforms like LinkedIn. Designing such systems involves integrating heterogeneous signals across domains, capturing temporal dynamics, and optimizing for multiple, often competing, objectives. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a powerful framework for modeling complex interactions in such environments. In this paper, we present a cross-domain GNN-based system deployed at LinkedIn that unifies user, content, and activity signals into a single, large-scale graph. By training on this cross-domain structure, our model significantly outperforms single-domain baselines on key tasks, including click-through rate (CTR) prediction and professional engagement. We introduce architectural innovations including temporal modeling and multi-task learning, which further enhance performance. Deployed in LinkedIn's notification system, our approach led to a 0.10% lift in weekly active users and a 0.62% improvement in CTR. We detail our graph construction process, model design, training pipeline, and both offline and online evaluations. Our work demonstrates the scalability and effectiveness of cross-domain GNNs in real-world, high-impact applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Personalized PageRank Graph Attention Networks

There has been a rising interest in graph neural networks (GNNs) for representation learning over the past few years. GNNs provide a general and efficient framework to learn from graph-structured data. However, GNNs typically only use the information of a very limited neighborhood for each node to avoid over-smoothing. A larger neighborhood would be desirable to provide the model with more information. In this work, we incorporate the limit distribution of Personalized PageRank (PPR) into graph attention networks (GATs) to reflect the larger neighbor information without introducing over-smoothing. Intuitively, message aggregation based on Personalized PageRank corresponds to infinitely many neighborhood aggregation layers. We show that our models outperform a variety of baseline models for four widely used benchmark datasets. Our implementation is publicly available online.

cs.LG↗