arXiv AI

From Prediction to Incrementality: Causal Optimization for Large-Scale Targeting and Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 10182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale targeting and recommendation systems are typically built around predictive scores fed into heuristic or local allocation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

DCEO: Direct Causal Effect Optimization for Long-Term User Value Modeling in E-commerce Search

The paper introduces DCEO, a data‑driven framework that learns item‑level proxy scores directly aligned with long‑term user objectives in e‑commerce search. It aggregates these scores into a user‑level metric, measures alignment via relative causal effect, and uses an actor‑critic model to generate context‑dependent fusion weights for multiple objectives. Offline experiments and a 41‑day online A/B test show DCEO improves GMV by 0.36% over traditional proxies.

By Junzhao Zhang, Tao Zhang, Liren Yu, Feiyi Dong, Zhixuan Zhang, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 5

Generative Optimization for Incentivized Advertising with Global Level Constraints

Incentivized advertising allocates monetary or virtual rewards to drive user engagement, where a key challenge is optimizing continuous incentive magnitudes under strict global constraints. This problem is complicated by high-frequency interactions, delayed feedback, and non-Markovian user dynamics such as fatigue, which limit the effectiveness of existing uplift modeling and constrained reinforcement learning approaches.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits: Bridging Uplift Modeling and Sequential Decision-Making

The paper introduces Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits (BCCB), an online framework that learns individual treatment effects, explores uncertain users, and manages budget pacing simultaneously. It derives a per-arrival decision rule from a KKT condition of a Lagrangian relaxation, providing a principled algorithmic foundation. Experiments on the Criteo Uplift dataset show BCCB outperforms offline pipelines and other online baselines, especially when historical data is scarce (below 7,500 observations).

By Abhirami Pillai
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Incremental Recommendation via Causal Models

The paper proposes an incremental recommendation approach that uses a causal model built from existing holdback data to avoid delivering redundant recommendations. By applying a dual‑threshold targeting policy, the system only recommends content when the likelihood of a treated stream is high and the likelihood of an organic stream is low, thereby reducing recommendation impressions by 7% without hurting overall consumption. Joint training with holdback data also improves the calibration of the treated head, suggesting that causal models capture more generalisable representations than purely observational models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Incremental Recommendation via Causal Models

The paper proposes an incremental recommendation system that uses causal modeling to avoid delivering redundant recommendations. By leveraging existing holdback data and a dual‑threshold targeting policy, the authors reduce recommendation impressions by 7% without harming overall content consumption. Joint training with holdback data also improves the calibration of the treated model, suggesting better generalisable representations than purely observational models.

By Athanasios Vlontzos, David Gustafsson, Michael O'Riordan, Ciar\'an M. Gilligan-Lee