3rd International Workshop on Industrial Recommendation Systems (at CIKM 2024)

October 25, 2024, Boise, Idaho, USA

Introduction

Recommendation systems are used widely in ecommerce industries, multimedia content platforms and social networks to provide suggestions that a user will most likely consume or connect; thus, improving the user experience. This motivates people in both industry and research organizations to focus on personalization or recommendation algorithms, which has resulted in a plethora of research papers. While academic research mostly focuses on the performance of recommendation algorithms in terms of ranking quality or accuracy, it often neglects key factors that impact how a recommendation system will perform in a real-world environment. These key factors include but are not limited to: business metric definition and evaluation, recommendation quality control, data and model scalability, model interpretability, model robustness and fairness, and resource limitations, such as budget on computing and memory resources, engineering workforce cost, etc..

The gap in constraints and requirements between academic research and industry limits the broad applicability of many of academia’s contributions for industrial recommendation systems. This workshop aspires to bridge this gap by bringing together researchers from both academia and industry. Its goal is to serve as a platform via which academic researchers become aware of the additional factors that may affect the chances of algorithm adoption into real production systems, and the performance of the algorithms if deployed. Industrial researchers will also benefit from sharing the practical frameworks at an industrial level.

Registration Information:

Please note that all workshop attendees must be registered, either into the whole conference, or in a workshop only registration. Please refer to the CIKM2024 main conference for more information regarding the registration.

Attendance Policy:

Following the schedule of the CIKM2024 conference, our workshop will be hybrid. In-person and virtual attendance are all welcome. More details will be shared as soon as we are able to.

Speakers

Jiaqi Zhai

Jiaqi Zhai Distinguished Engineer Meta

Maria Dimakopoulou

Maria Dimakopoulou Director of Machine Learning Spotify

Zhiwei Liu

Zhiwei Liu Senior Research Scientist Salesforce AI Research

Da Xu

Da Xu Staff AI Engineer LinkedIn

Zhankui He

Zhankui He Research Scientist Google DeepMind

PROGRAMS

Time Speaker Title
08:55AM - 09:00AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Host Chairs Welcome and Open Remarks
09:00AM - 09:45AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Efficient Data Representation Learning in Google-scale Systems Keynote 1: Zhankui He (Google Deepmind)
09:45AM - 10:30AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) "Who to Follow" at LinkedIn -- Advancing the Creator Ecosystem in GenAI Era Keynote 2: Da Xu (LinkedIn)
10:30AM - 10:45AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Recommendations in Sparse-Data Low-Resource Settings by Constructing Concise User Profiles from Review Text Oral Paper Presentation 1
10:45AM - 11:00AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Visual Summary Thought of Large Vision-Language Models for Multimodal Recommendation Oral Paper Presentation 2
11:00AM - 11:45AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Actions Speak Louder than Words: Building the Next Generation Recommendation Systems Keynote 3: Jiaqi Zhai (Meta)
11:45AM - 01:30PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Break Lunch Break
01:30PM - 02:15PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Recent Advances in AI agent: an Overview Keynote 4: Zhiwei Liu (Salesforce AI)
02:15PM - 03:00PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Personalization in Spotify Keynote 5: Maria Dimakopoulou (Spotify)
03:00PM - 03:15PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) WebReco: A Comprehensive Overview of an Industrial-Scale Webpage Recommendation System at Bing Oral Presentation 3
03:15PM - 03:30PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Improving feature interactions at Pinterest under industry constraints Oral Presentation 4
03:30PM - 04:00PM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Poster Authors Poster Session
04:00PM - 04:10AM, 2024/10/25 (MT) Host Chairs Closing Remarks

Important Dates

August 5, 2024 August 16, 2024 : Workshop paper submission (deadline extended)

August 30, 2024: Workshop paper notifications

September 7, 2024: Camera-ready deadline for workshop papers

October 25 9:00am (MDT) - October 25 5:30pm (MDT), 2024 / October 25 8:00am (PT) - October 25 4:30pm (PT), 2024: Workshop Date

Accepted Publications

  • Recommendations in Sparse-Data Low-Resource Settings by Constructing Concise User Profiles from Review Text [PDF] [from Amazon, Max Planck Institute and University of Amsterdam] (Oral)
  •      Authors: Ghazaleh Haratinezhad Torbati, Anna Tigunova, Gerhard Weikum and Andrew Yates

  • WebReco: A Comprehensive Overview of an Industrial-Scale Webpage Recommendation System at Bing [PDF] [from Microsoft AI] (Oral)
  •      Authors: Jaidev Shah, Amey Barapatre, Iman Barjasteh, Chuck Wang, Gang Luo, Rana Forsati, Jing Chu, Xugang Wang, Julie Fang, Fan Wu, Jiahui Liu, Xue Deng, Blake Shepard, Ronak Shah, Shaden Smith, Jon Soifer, Linjun Yang, Chuanjie Liu and Hongzhi Li

  • Improving feature interactions at Pinterest under industry constraints [PDF] [from Pinterest] (Oral)
  •      Authors: Siddarth Malreddy, Matthew Lawhon, Usha Amrutha Nookala, Aditya Mantha and Dhruvil Deven Badani

  • Visual Summary Thought of Large Vision-Language Models for Multimodal Recommendation [PDF] [from University of Illinois at Chicago and Lehigh University] (Oral)
  •      Authors: Yuqing Liu, Yu Wang, Lichao Sun and Philip Yu

  • Semantic Search Evaluation [PDF] [from LinkedIn] (Poster)
  •      Authors: Chujie Zheng, Jeffrey Wang, Albee Zhang, Anand Kishore and Siddharth Singh

  • Improving Pinterest Search Relevance Using Large Language Models [PDF] [from Pinterest] (Poster)
  •      Authors: Han Wang, Mukuntha Narayanan Sundararaman, Onur Gungor, Yu Xu, Krishna Kamath, Rakesh Chalasani and Kurchi Subhra Hazra

  • Crafting Tomorrow: The Influence of Design Choices on Fresh Content in Social Media Recommendation [PDF] [from ShareChat and Sourcegraph] (Poster)
  •      Authors: Srijan Saket, Mohit Agarwal and Rishabh Mehrotra

  • Optimizing Explorations in Largescale Recommendations System with Information Sharing [PDF] [from Walmart] (Poster)
  •      Authors: Zhihao Huang, Ankur Bhardwaj, Abdus Khan and Afroza Ali

    Program Committee

    We want to thank our program committee members for their hard work to select the valuable publications for our workshop.

    • Chenhao Fang, Meta
    • Yu Chen, Google
    • Jiao Chen, Walmart Global Tech
    • Zheng Liu, TikTok
    • Zezhong Fan, Walmart Global Tech
    • Jiayi Liu, Purdue University
    • Shalin Barot, Walmart Global Tech
    • Yuqing Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago
    • Xiaolong Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago
    • Praveen Kumar Kanumala, Walmart Global Tech
    • Venugopal Mani, Meta
    • Yokila Arora, Walmart Global Tech
    • Ipsita Mohanty, Salesforce
    • Shubham Gupta, Walmart Global Tech

    Workshop Co-Chairs

    Luyi Ma

    Luyi Ma Walmart Global Tech email: luyi.ma@walmart.com

    Xiaohan Li

    Xiaohan Li Walmart Global Tech email: xiaohan.li@walmart.com

    Kamilia Ahmadi

    Kamilia Ahmadi Warner Bors. Discovery

    Jianpeng Xu

    Jianpeng Xu Walmart Global Tech

    Organizing Committees

    George Karypis

    George Karypis UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA TWIN CITIES and AMAZON

    Philip S. Yu

    Philip S. Yu University of Illinois at Chicago

    Call For Papers

    This workshop welcomes submissions from researchers and industrial practitioners broadly related to recommendation systems, such as novel recommendation models, efficient recommendation algorithms, novel industrial frameworks, etc. In order to emphasize the gap between the two communities, we extremely welcome submissions on industrial recommendation system infrastructures based on given resources, models and algorithms supported by the specific infrastructures, and frameworks or end-to-end systems that have been deployed in real world production. All accepted papers will be posted on the workshop website and will not appear in the CIKM proceedings. Selected papers will be presented as contributed talks.

    Specific topics of interest are including but not limited to:

    1. Frameworks or end-to-end systems from the industry are extremely welcomed.
    2. Large language models (LLMs) and Generative models in recommender systems.
    3. Scalable Recommender systems.
    4. Personalization, including personalized product recommendation, streaming content recommendation, ads recommendation, news and article recommendation, etc.
    5. New applications related to recommendation systems.
    6. LLM agents for recommendation systems.
    7. Existing or novel infrastructures for recommendation systems.
    8. Interactive recommendation system with user feedback loop.
    9. Explainability of recommendations.
    10. Conversational and natural language recommender system.
    11. Fairness, privacy and security in recommender systems.
    12. Recommendations under multi-objective and constraints.
    13. Reproducibility of models and evaluation metrics.
    14. Unbiased recommendation.
    15. User research studies on real-world recommender systems.
    16. Business impact of recommendation systems.

    Submission Directions:

    The workshop accepts long papers (limited to 9 pages), short papers (6 pages), posters (4 pages), abstracts and demos (2 pages). Paper submission and reviewing will be following the directions of the CIKM main conference. Reviews are not double-blind, and author names and affiliations should be listed. Submissions should include all content and references within the limited pages, and must be in PDF format and formatted according to the new Standard ACM Conference Proceedings Template. For LaTeX users: unzip acmart.zip, make, and use sample-sigconf.tex as a template. Additional information about formatting and style files is available online at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Papers that do not meet the formatting requirements will be rejected without review. In addition, authors can provide an optional two (2) page supplement at the end of their submitted paper (it needs to be in the same PDF file) focused on reproducibility.

    We provide the submission link here. We are also preparing a special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292) on Advances in Intelligent Data Processing and Modeling. High-quality submissions will be recommended to submit to this special issue.