Ensure Timeliness and Accuracy: A Novel Sliding Window Data Stream Paradigm for Live Streaming Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Sliver, a novel sliding window data stream paradigm for live streaming recommendation systems that improves timeliness and accuracy by reducing latency and optimizing data windowing.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new data stream design paradigm called Sliver, addressing timeliness and accuracy issues in live streaming recommendations through a sliding window approach.

Findings

Sliver outperforms fixed-window data streams in offline experiments.

Deployment of Sliver on Kuaishou platform shows significant CTR and NFN improvements.

Sliver effectively balances labeling accuracy and timeliness in live recommendations.

Abstract

Live streaming recommender system is specifically designed to recommend real-time live streaming of interest to users. Due to the dynamic changes of live content, improving the timeliness of the live streaming recommender system is a critical problem. Intuitively, the timeliness of the data determines the upper bound of the timeliness that models can learn. However, none of the previous works addresses the timeliness problem of the live streaming recommender system from the perspective of data stream design. Employing the conventional fixed window data stream paradigm introduces a trade-off dilemma between labeling accuracy and timeliness. In this paper, we propose a new data stream design paradigm, dubbed Sliver, that addresses the timeliness and accuracy problem of labels by reducing the window size and implementing a sliding window correspondingly. Meanwhile, we propose a time-sensitive re-reco strategy reducing the latency between request and impression to improve the timeliness of the recommendation service and features by periodically requesting the recommendation service. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct offline experiments on a multi-task live streaming dataset with labeling timestamps collected from the Kuaishou live streaming platform. Experimental results demonstrate that Sliver outperforms two fixed-window data streams with varying window sizes across all targets in four typical multi-task recommendation models. Furthermore, we deployed Sliver on the Kuaishou live streaming platform. Results of the online A/B test show a significant improvement in click-through rate (CTR), and new follow number (NFN), further validating the effectiveness of Sliver.