Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2508.05700

Multi-Faceted Large Embedding Tables for Pinterest Ads Ranking

Abstract

Large embedding tables are indispensable in modern recommendation systems, thanks to their ability to effectively capture and memorize intricate details of interactions among diverse entities. As we explore integrating large embedding tables into Pinterest's ads ranking models, we encountered not only common challenges such as sparsity and scalability, but also several obstacles unique to our context. Notably, our initial attempts to train large embedding tables from scratch resulted in neutral metrics. To tackle this, we introduced a novel multi-faceted pretraining scheme that incorporates multiple pretraining algorithms. This approach greatly enriched the embedding tables and resulted in significant performance improvements. As a result, the multi-faceted large embedding tables bring great performance gain on both the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) domains. Moreover, we designed a CPU-GPU hybrid serving infrastructure to overcome GPU memory limits and elevate the scalability. This framework has been deployed in the Pinterest Ads system and achieved 1.34% online CPC reduction and 2.60% CTR increase with neutral end-to-end latency change.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Runze Su, Jiayin Jin, Jiacheng Li, Sihan Wang, Guangtong Bai, Zelun Wang, Li Tang, Yixiong Meng, Huasen Wu, Zhimeng Pan, Kungang Li, Han Sun, Zhifang Liu, Haoyang Li, Siping Ji, Degao Peng, Jinfeng Zhuang, Ling Leng, Prathibha Deshikachar. 2025-08-11. Multi-Faceted Large Embedding Tables for Pinterest Ads Ranking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05700

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Offline A/B Testing of Slate Recommendation Systems with LLMs: Reducing the Dependency on Pre-Collected User Interaction Data

Slate recommender systems (RecSys) present users with ordered sets of interacting items (e.g., playlists). We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can articulate pairwise preferences between slates for synthetic A/B testing of slate RecSys. We introduce a validation protocol measuring the alignment of synthetic preferences with classical RecSys metrics and their compliance with preference axioms, and use it to characterise how LLM pre-training and configuration affect slate preference articulation. Combined with the generalized Rao-Kupper model, synthetic LLM-based A/B testing recovers rankings that remain stable across utility weightings, whereas off-policy estimators are reliable only when the target utility matches the logged behavior. We position it as a screening stage between off-policy evaluation and live experiments: not a replacement for A/B testing, but a way to reserve its cost for the most promising candidates.

cs.IR↗

MM-BRIGHT: A Multi-Task Multimodal Benchmark for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of text-based queries where keyword or semantic matching is usually sufficient. Many real-world queries contain multimodal elements, particularly, images such as diagrams, charts, and screenshots that require intensive reasoning to identify relevant documents. To address this gap, we introduce MM-BRIGHT, the first multimodal benchmark for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Our dataset consists of 2,803 real-world queries spanning 29 diverse technical domains, with four tasks of increasing complexity: text-to-text, multimodal-to-text, multimodal-to-image, and multimodal-to-multimodal retrieval. Extensive evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art models struggle across all tasks: BM25 achieves only 8.5 nDCG@10 on text-only retrieval, while the best multimodal model Nomic-Vision reaches just 27.6 nDCG@10 on multimodal-to-text retrieval actually underperforming the best text-only model (DiVeR: 32.2). These results highlight substantial headroom and position MM-BRIGHT as a testbed for next-generation retrieval models that better integrate visual reasoning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/mm-bright/MM-BRIGHT. See also our official website: https://mm-bright.github.io/.

cs.IR↗

From Ranked Documents to Reliable Contexts: An Answer-Oriented Context Construct Framework for AI Search

Traditional Web search follows a human-facing paradigm in which users inspect ranked documents and synthesize information themselves. In AI Search, retrieved documents instead serve as inputs to a generation model, shifting the retrieval objective from ranking documents by Search Satisfaction to constructing reliable context for correct answer generation. We formulate this shift as answer-oriented context construction through a three-stage framework: (1) Answer Support identifies candidate documents that contribute information to answer generation; (2) Content Trustworthiness assesses whether this information provides a reliable basis for correct answers from source, temporal, and factual perspectives; and (3) Context Organization selects, consolidates, and structures retained information under a finite context budget for consistent and robust generation. We further develop an industrial workflow spanning prior and posterior optimization and establish a systematic evaluation protocol covering both retrieval-side context and final answers. Experiments show consistent improvements at both Retrieval and Answer levels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the framework and its industrial implementation.

cs.IR↗