Multitask Ranking System for Immersive Feed and No More Clicks: A Case Study of Short-Form Video Recommendation

Qingyun Liu, Zhe Zhao, Liang Liu, Zhen Zhang, Junjie Shan, Yuening Li, Shuchao Bi, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi

Abstract: In recent years, social media users spend significant amount of time on Short-Form Video (SFV) platforms. Its success in creating an immersive viewership experience is not only from the content, but also due to its unique UI innovation: instead of providing choices for users to click, SFV platforms actively recommend content to users to watch one at a time. In this paper, we highlight unique challenges rooted from such UI changes for SFV recommendation system design. Firstly, there is yet much unexplored for sources of system biases under the new UI, as there are no clicks nor the common click-based position biases. Additionally, when training multiple types of user activities, positive labels for activities like sharing and commenting can be much sparser and more skewed than traditional click-based recommendation systems, as the latter can filter non-click impressions when generating "post-click" activities.To tackle these challenges, we introduce a unified multi-task ranking framework which puts two novel components all together into an overall system for SFV recommendation. First, we identify that there are position biases of SFVs in the recommendation sequence, namely "watch trail biases", and introduce biases correction using trail-related information. Second, to get the most benefits from multi-task learning, especially co-training tasks with extremely skewed and sparse labels, we adapt a disentangle regularization to mitigate task conflicts, introduce loss upweighting for sparse task co-training and adopt a meta-learning algorithm for efficient weight selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework on one of today's largest SFV platforms. Our framework has been deployed to the production system for more than 6 months.