RecSys Challenge 2023

About top

The RecSys 2023 Challenge will be organized by Sarang Brahme, Rahul Agarwal (ShareChat), Abhishek Srivastava (IIM Visakhapatnam, India), Liu Yong (Huawei, Singapore) and Athirai Irissappane (Amazon, USA) based on the data provided by ShareChat. This year’s challenge will focus on online advertising, improving deep funnel optimization, and user privacy.

The challenge is brought to you by ShareChat. ShareChat is India’s largest homegrown social media company, with 400+ million MAUs across all its platforms. Headquartered in Bengaluru, ShareChat is spreading its team globally across India, the USA, and Europe. We have the best-in-class AI & ML technology and the strongest feed ranking system powering our growth. We aim to create a million monetizable creators with USD 450 million in creator earnings across ShareChat and Moj by 2025.


Challenge Task top

Online advertising has been a multi-billion dollar industry since the early 2000 and has played a significant role in the growth of the internet. The key advantage of online advertising over conventional mass advertising is its inherent ability to personalize to users, democratizing advertising and enabling businesses of all sizes to participate, and providing the measurable impact of money spent to the advertisers. Over the past two decades, the nature of online advertising has also evolved tremendously from pure banner-based advertising, where advertisers were charged based on the number of ad impressions, to deep funnel optimizations, where advertisers can optimize for eventual sales.

The efficacy of deep funnel optimization required extensive personalization and opened up rich problems in real-time auction design, large-scale machine learning, modeling delayed feedback, and behavioral understanding. As these systems matured, we also started developing a rich understanding of the need to preserve user privacy, ensure AI fairness, and prevent adversarial exploitation of the platform. In this challenge, we aim to provide a real-world ad dataset from the Sharechat and Moj apps to act as a benchmark for research into deep funnel optimization with a focus on user privacy


DataSet top

  1. The dataset corresponds to roughly 10M random users who visited the ShareChat + Moj app over three months. We have sampled each user's activity to generate 10 impressions corresponding to each user. Our target variable is whether there was an install for an app by the user or not.

  2. To represent a user, several features are provided:

    1. Demographic features: These include age, gender, and geographic location from where the user is accessing the Sharechat/Moj app. The sampling of the users in (1) is done such that we have an approximately uniform distribution of users across the demographic features. The user's location is hashed to a 32-bit to anonymize the data.
    2. Content preference embeddings: These embeddings are trained based on the users' consumption of the various non-ad content on the Sharechat/Moj app.
    3. App affinity embeddings: These embeddings are trained based on the past apps installed by the user on our platform.

  3. We also have features corresponding to ads

    1. Ad categorical features: These features represent different characteristics of an ad, including the size of the ad, the category of the ad etc. The features are hashed to 32-bit to anonymize the data
    2. Ad embedding: These represent the actual video/image content of the ad.

  4. To capture the historical interactions between users and ads, we also provide

    1. Count features: These features represent the user interaction with ads, advertisers, and categories of advertisers over different lengths of a time window

  5. Every row of the data has an associated numeric id and represents an ad impression shown to the user and whether it resulted in a click on the ad and subsequently an install or not.

  6. We do not provide the semantics of the individual features.

  7. The training data consists of subsampled impressions/clicks/installs from the past 2 weeks and aims to predict the probability of install for the 15th day.


Prize top



Participation and Data top


Registration & Data Access is open now!


Timeline top

When? What?
27 March, 2023 Start RecSys Challenge

Release dataset

11 Apr, 2023 Submission System Open
13 Apr, 2023 Leaderboard live
22nd June, 2023 18 June, 2023 End RecSys Challenge
28th June, 2023 24 June, 2023 Final Leaderboard & Winners

EasyChair open for submissions

3rd July, 2023 30 June, 2023 Code Upload

Upload code of the final predictions

14 July, 2023 Paper Submission Due
1 August, 2023 Paper Acceptance Notifications
14 August, 2023 Camera-Ready Papers
Sept 3rd week RecSys Challenge Workshop

@ ACM RecSys 2023



Paper Submission Guidelines top

Submission website: EasyChair



Workshop Program and Accepted Papers top

The RecSys Challenge Workshop will take place on September 19th, 2023
All times are SGT
Time Session
9:00-9:15Opening
9:15-9:30A Simple and Robust Ensemble For Click-Through Rate Prediction Xingmei Wang and Yankai Wanga
9:30-9:45Predicting Conversion Rate in Advertising Systems: A Two-Stage Approach with LightGBM Lulu Wang, Yu Zhang, Huayang Zhao, Zhewei Song and Jiaxin Hu
9:45-10.00Integrating Explicit and Implicit Feature Interactions for Online Ad Installation Forecasting Jiawei Jiang, Bing Wang and Jingyuan Wang
10:00-10:15Capturing Performance and Privacy by Assembling Avengers of Online Advertising Taehee Kim, Seungyun Baek, Taehyeon Jeon, Hojin Jung, Joonhong Kim and Taeho Lee
10:15-10:30Lightweight Boosting Models for User Response Prediction Using Adversarial Validation Hyeonwoo Kim and Wonsung Lee
  
10:30-11:15Coffee Break
  
11:15-11:30Robust User Engagement Modeling With Transformers and Self Supervision Yichao Lu and Maksims Volkovs
11:30-11:45Pessimistic Rescaling and Distribution Shift of Boosting Models for Impression-Aware Online Advertising Recommendation Paolo Basso, Arturo Benedetti, Nicola Cecere, Alessandro Maranelli, Salvatore Marragony, Samuele Peri, Andrea Riboni, Alessandro Verosimile, Davide Zanutto and Maurizio Ferrari Dacrem
11:45-12:00Graph Enhanced Feature Engineering for Privacy Preserving Recommendation Systems Chendi Xue, Xinyao Wang, Yu Zhou, Poovaiah Palangappa, Rita Brugarolas Brufau, Aasavari Dhananjay Kakne, Ravi Motwani, Ke Ding and Jian Zhang
12:00-12:15A Simple yet Strong Approach for Installation Prediction in ShareChat Ads Xiaoteng Shen, Liangcai Su, Zhutian Lin and Xiao Xi
12:15-12:30Large Scale CVR Prediction through Hierarchical History Modeling Qi Zhang, Zhibin Zhang, Biao Lu, Bangzheng He and Liangbi Li
12.30-12:35Closing remarks



Organization top

Workshop Program Committee top