Paper ID: 2302.13915

TwERC: High Performance Ensembled Candidate Generation for Ads Recommendation at Twitter

Vanessa Cai, Pradeep Prabakar, Manuel Serrano Rebuelta, Lucas Rosen, Federico Monti, Katarzyna Janocha, Tomo Lazovich, Jeetu Raj, Yedendra Shrinivasan, Hao Li, Thomas Markovich

Recommendation systems are a core feature of social media companies with their uses including recommending organic and promoted contents. Many modern recommendation systems are split into multiple stages - candidate generation and heavy ranking - to balance computational cost against recommendation quality. We focus on the candidate generation phase of a large-scale ads recommendation problem in this paper, and present a machine learning first heterogeneous re-architecture of this stage which we term TwERC. We show that a system that combines a real-time light ranker with sourcing strategies capable of capturing additional information provides validated gains. We present two strategies. The first strategy uses a notion of similarity in the interaction graph, while the second strategy caches previous scores from the ranking stage. The graph based strategy achieves a 4.08% revenue gain and the rankscore based strategy achieves a 1.38% gain. These two strategies have biases that complement both the light ranker and one another. Finally, we describe a set of metrics that we believe are valuable as a means of understanding the complex product trade offs inherent in industrial candidate generation systems.

Submitted: Feb 27, 2023