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Vishwanath Sangale

Publications and source records attributed to Vishwanath Sangale.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Causal-Informed Hybrid Online Adaptive Optimization for Ad Load Personalization in Large-Scale Social Networks

Personalizing ad load in large-scale social networks requires balancing user experience and conversions under operational constraints. Traditional primal-dual methods enforce constraints reliably but adapt slowly in dynamic environments, while Bayesian Optimization (BO) enables exploration but suffers from slow convergence. We propose a hybrid online adaptive optimization framework CTRCBO ( Cohort-Based Trust Region Contextual Bayesian Optimization), combining primal-dual with BO, enhanced by trust-region updates and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) surrogates for both objectives and constraints. Our approach leverages a upstream Causal ML model to inform the surrogate, improving decision quality and enabling efficient exploration-exploitation and online tuning. We evaluate our method on a billion-user social network, demonstrating faster convergence, robust constraint satisfaction, and improved personalization metrics, including real-world online AB test results.

cs.SI↗

Treatment Effect Learning Under Sequential Randomization

Sequential treatment assignments in online experiments lead to complex dependency structures, often rendering identification, estimation and inference over treatments a challenge. Treatments in one session (e.g., a user logging on) can have an effect that persists into subsequent sessions, leading to cumulative effects on outcomes measured at a later stage. This can render standard methods for identification and inference trivially misspecified. We propose T-Learners layered into the G-Formula for this setting, building on literature from causal machine learning and identification in sequential settings. In a simple simulation, this approach prevents decaying accuracy in the presence of carry-over effects, highlighting the importance of identification and inference strategies tailored to the nature of systems often seen in the tech domain.

stat.AP↗

NxtPost: User to Post Recommendations in Facebook Groups

In this paper, we present NxtPost, a deployed user-to-post content-based sequential recommender system for Facebook Groups. Inspired by recent advances in NLP, we have adapted a Transformer-based model to the domain of sequential recommendation. We explore causal masked multi-head attention that optimizes both short and long-term user interests. From a user's past activities validated by defined safety process, NxtPost seeks to learn a representation for the user's dynamic content preference and to predict the next post user may be interested in. In contrast to previous Transformer-based methods, we do not assume that the recommendable posts have a fixed corpus. Accordingly, we use an external item/token embedding to extend a sequence-based approach to a large vocabulary. We achieve 49% abs. improvement in offline evaluation. As a result of NxtPost deployment, 0.6% more users are meeting new people, engaging with the community, sharing knowledge and getting support. The paper shares our experience in developing a personalized sequential recommender system, lessons deploying the model for cold start users, how to deal with freshness, and tuning strategies to reach higher efficiency in online A/B experiments.

cs.LG↗