EXIT: An EXplicit Interest Transfer Framework for Cross-Domain Recommendation

TL;DR

EXIT is a straightforward framework for cross-domain recommendation that explicitly transfers beneficial user interests using supervised learning, improving accuracy without complex models, and has been successfully deployed in Meituan's industrial system.

Contribution

The paper introduces EXIT, a novel explicit interest transfer framework that uses supervised learning and scene modeling to enhance cross-domain recommendation accuracy.

Findings

Validated on industrial datasets with offline and online tests.

Outperforms implicit transfer methods in accuracy and robustness.

Successfully deployed in Meituan's homepage recommendation system.

Abstract

Cross-domain recommendation has attracted substantial interest in industrial apps such as Meituan, which serves multiple business domains via knowledge transfer and meets the diverse interests of users. However, existing methods typically follow an implicit modeling paradigm that blends the knowledge from both the source and target domains, and design intricate network structures to share learned embeddings or patterns between domains to improve recommendation accuracy. Since the transfer of interest signals is unsupervised, these implicit paradigms often struggle with the negative transfer resulting from differences in service functions and presentation forms across different domains. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective EXplicit Interest Transfer framework named EXIT to address the stated challenge. Specifically, we propose a novel label combination approach that enables the model to directly learn beneficial source domain interests through supervised learning, while excluding inappropriate interest signals. Moreover, we introduce a scene selector network to model the interest transfer intensity under fine-grained scenes. Offline experiments conducted on the industrial production dataset and online A/B tests validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed framework. Without complex network structures or training processes, EXIT can be easily deployed in the industrial recommendation system. EXIT has been successfully deployed in the online homepage recommendation system of Meituan App, serving the main traffic.