Query- and Candidate-Aware Long User Sequence Modeling for Sponsored Product Ranking in Search
2611.11675

Authors

Matt Lindsay,Dongyue Xie,Iurii Shcherbak,Arushi Jain,Wanchen Shao

Abstract

User sequence modeling is widely used in recommendation and advertising. Search ranking presents an additional challenge: the current query expresses immediate intent, while a candidate product determines which parts of a user's long-term history are relevant.

We present a production sequence framework for sponsored-product ranking that augments recent behavior with two retrieval channels over long-term history: candidate-nearest-neighbor retrieval and query-nearest-neighbor retrieval. The selected actions are encoded together with dedicated query and candidate context tokens, while candidate-aware early fusion injects the candidate into every history token.

Offline ablations show that dual retrieval improves major ranking metrics relative to the production baseline. In an online A/B test on sponsored-product search traffic, the model increased CTR, attributed conversion rate, and orders per impression.

Resources

Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphicRay graphic

Stay in the loop

Every AI paper that matters, free in your inbox daily.

Details

  • takara.ai
  • Custom AI and machine learning from the Frontier Research Team.
  • © 2026 takara.ai Ltd
  • Content is sourced from third-party publications.
Ray graphicRay graphicRay graphic