online content curators

Abstract: Large-scale industrial ranking models must jointly capture heterogeneous feature interactions, long-term user behaviors, and multi-scenario dependencies under stringent online serving constraints. Existing architectures typically process sequential and non-sequential features with separate modules, limiting bidirectional information exchange. Directly applying homogeneous self-attention to all semantic tokens can also be inefficient when sequential and non-sequential signals exhibit different effective-ranks (eRanks). Meanwhile, shared representations can overlook scenario-specific patterns and induce negative transfer between scenarios. In this paper, we propose HiRank, a unified framework for multi-scenario recommendation that jointly models Heterogeneous feature Interactions via effective-Rank scaling. HiRank integrates gated sequential attention with heterogeneous feature interaction within a unified backbone, enabling bidirectional fusion between sequential and non-sequential representations. HiRank further uses scenario-aware aggregation to compress heterogeneous low-order tokens into a compact representation. Distinct learned projections transform the full compact representation into scenario-aware composite tokens with complementary global feature views and more uniform information density, enabling more effective high-order self-attention. Extensive experiments on industrial-scale datasets demonstrate favorable performance scaling with parameter count and consistent improvements over competitive baselines. Online A/B tests further show a 2.27% increase in orders per user.

Abstract: Generative AI search and AI overviews are transforming access to information and news, renewing concerns that readers will encounter a narrower range of topics and have less in common. We examine these concerns via a randomized field experiment with 37,561 readers at The Washington Post. Both groups searched the same archive, but treatment readers also received AI answers with article citations above conventional results. Measuring consumption across displayed answers and opened articles, we find that AI search expands the reach of widely read topics and increases overlap in readers' topic consumption. At the same time, consumption becomes less concentrated and shifts toward less-popular topics, both within readers and across the audience. AI answers account for most of the increase in shared information, delivering it without requiring article clicks and broadening exposure beyond the articles readers open. Cited articles also contribute to the shift toward less-popular topics. Readers shift from conventional-result clicks and browsing toward cited articles and follow-up searches. More frequent searching offsets lower article consumption per search, producing a small increase in article consumption per reader. Total information consumption per minute also rises. Generative AI search can thus diversify collective attention while strengthening the information readers have in common.