CAPTS: Channel-Aware, Preference-Aligned Trigger Selection for Multi-Channel Item-to-Item Retrieval

TL;DR

This paper introduces CAPTS, a novel framework for multi-channel trigger selection in recommender systems that improves retrieval effectiveness by addressing bias and uncoordinated routing through learnable modules.

Contribution

CAPTS is a unified, learnable trigger selection framework that enhances multi-channel retrieval by crediting triggers with downstream engagement and coordinating trigger-to-channel assignment.

Findings

Improves multi-channel recall offline

Achieves +0.351% lift in online user engagement

Demonstrates effectiveness in large-scale online platform

Abstract

Large-scale industrial recommender systems commonly adopt multi-channel retrieval for candidate generation, combining direct user-to-item (U2I) retrieval with two-hop user-to-item-to-item (U2I2I) pipelines. In U2I2I, the system selects a small set of historical interactions as triggers to seed downstream item-to-item (I2I) retrieval across multiple channels. In production, triggers are often selected using rule-based policies or learned scorers and tuned in a channel-by-channel manner. However, these practices face two persistent challenges: biased value attribution that values triggers by on-trigger feedback rather than their downstream utility as retrieval seeds, and uncoordinated multi-channel routing where channels select triggers independently under a shared quota, increasing cross-channel overlap. To address these challenges, we propose Channel-Aware, Preference-Aligned Trigger Selection (CAPTS), a unified and flexible framework that treats multi-channel trigger selection as a learnable routing problem. CAPTS introduces a Value Attribution Module (VAM) that provides look-ahead supervision by crediting each trigger with the subsequent engagement generated by items retrieved from it on each I2I channel, and a Channel-Adaptive Trigger Routing (CATR) module that coordinates trigger-to-channel assignment to maximize the overall value of multi-channel retrieval. Extensive offline experiments and large-scale online A/B tests on Kwai, Kuaishou's international short-video platform, show that CAPTS consistently improves multi-channel recall offline and delivers a +0.351% lift in average time spent per device online.