Seq2Slate: Re-ranking and Slate Optimization with RNNs
Authors: Irwan Bello, Sayali Kulkarni, Sagar Jain, Craig Boutilier, Ed Chi, Elad Eban, Xiyang Luo, Alan Mackey, Ofer Meshi
Keywords: Recurrent neural networks, learning to rank, pointer networks
TL;DR: A pointer network architecture for re-ranking items, learned from click-through logs.
Abstract: Ranking is a central task in machine learning and information retrieval. In this task, it is especially important to present the user with a slate of items that is appealing as a whole. This in turn requires taking into account interactions between items, since intuitively, placing an item on the slate affects the decision of which other items should be chosen alongside it.
In this work, we propose a sequence-to-sequence model for ranking called seq2slate. At each step, the model predicts the next item to place on the slate given the items already chosen. The recurrent nature of the model allows complex dependencies between items to be captured directly in a flexible and scalable way. We show how to learn the model end-to-end from weak supervision in the form of easily obtained click-through data. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in experiments on standard ranking benchmarks as well as in a real-world recommendation system.