Robust Denoising Neural Reranker for Recommender Systems

For multi-stage recommenders in industry, a user request would first trigger a simple and efficient retriever module that selects and ranks a list of relevant items, then the recommender calls a slower but more sophisticated reranking model that refines the item list exposure to the user. To consistently optimize the two-stage retrieval reranking framework, most efforts have focused on learning reranker-aware retrievers. In contrast, there has been limited work on how to achieve a retriever-aware reranker. In this work, we provide evidence that the retriever scores from the previous stage are informative signals that have been underexplored. Specifically, we first empirically show that the reranking task under the two-stage framework is naturally a noise reduction problem on the retriever scores, and theoretically show the limitations of naive utilization techniques of the retriever scores. Following this notion, we derive an adversarial framework DNR that associates the denoising reranker with a carefully designed noise generation module. The resulting DNR solution extends the conventional score error minimization loss with three augmented objectives, including: 1) a denoising objective that aims to denoise the noisy retriever scores to align with the user feedback; 2) an adversarial retriever score generation objective that improves the exploration in the retriever score space; and 3) a distribution regularization term that aims to align the distribution of generated noisy retriever scores with the real ones. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets and an industrial recommender system, together with analytical support, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed DNR.