
Instagram’s Explore Recommender System - YoavShapira
https://instagram-engineering.com/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explore-recommender-system-7ca901d2a882
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gravitas
It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start
shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't
be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even
once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to
you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of
puppers filling your explore. :)

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raverbashing
There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text)

But yeah it can be off-putting.

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pornel
This option is not working for me at all.

I wonder if it's because if I see a thumbnail of something unwanted, I first
have to open the post in order to access the menu, so the the app counts it as
a view first, _adding_ the unwanted post to things I "engage" with.

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zten
Try long pressing and then sliding the post up. You'll get the same menu
without popping into the full post view. I don't think it counts as strongly,
because I've been able to eliminate a lot of things this way.

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sbilstein
If instagram's product KPIs were more inline with what I wanted as a user,
this would be great...but they're not and my explore feed is frequently filled
with models, child musical prodigies, and other popcorn-esque content.

Compared that to Spotify, whose goal I presume is to get me to listen to more
music and buy tickets and merch through their occasional marketing.

I'm a music snob but damn does Spotify get me great recommendations on new
releases, my discover weekly, and more. Not only that, I've bought tickets
through their frequent listener promotions probably more than 10 times at this
point.

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uoaei
I've had terrible luck the past couple years with Spotify's Discover Weekly.
Last time I remember it being good was Fall 2016. Now my "Discover" Weekly
playlist has me "discovering" the same exact songs over and over.

I've been pigeonholed way beyond what I thought possible. Do other users
really engage with the same 10 songs over and over and over that this is the
default behavior of their recommendation engine?

I get "Discover" tracks which are from the same album I have downloaded to my
phone!

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rozularen
Spotify's Discover Weekly has improved a lot since I started following
different Artists. At the begginning it was more like what you just said
everytime the same music over and over until I started following new Artists.

The same thing applies for New Releases.

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uoaei
Good call. I agree with you and I don't feel that requiring that level of user
engagement should be necessary to grant them a decent experience.

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automatoney
It's so interesting how powerful word embeddings (or in this case account
embeddings) are. This reminds me a bit of the 538 article[1] about doing math
on subreddits - I'd be interested to see what sort of math you could do on
instagram account embeddings. What happens when you subtract two celebrities
from each other?

Also, I'm curious about the tradeoffs of revealing this information - does
knowing this make it easier to game the instagram algorithm? From this article
I'd think that having a more narrowly targeted account (for example someone
putting selfies on one account and landscape photos on another) might make
their embedding more similar to others. Another thought is that maybe someone
liking a bunch of things unrelated to their content would make them wrongly
appear in certain explore pages.

[1] [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-
most-...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-
online-following/)

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stuff4ben
Is this really AI? This seems like simple classification and ranking. Honestly
I didn't see anything new in there that hasn't been around for the past 10
years. KNN? NDCG? That's entry level ML. TFA does throw around neural networks
a bit, but doesn't go into any detail.

EDIT: Maybe I'm just thrown off by the "Powered by AI" part of the article
title. I was expecting more I suppose.

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brenden2
Anything moderately related to software and data is called AI now, because
that's what gets the upvotes.

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thosakwe
AFAIK classification, deep learning, ML, etc. all are valid subsets of AI

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brenden2
It's more like complex linear regressions. The term "AI" evokes the idea of
computers possessing something similar to human intelligence which it very
much is not. We don't even properly understand how the human brain works.

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baddox
There’s no need for AI to actually work the same way that the human brain
works, and that’s never been part of the definition of “AI.”

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Akababa
I've worked at a large e-commerce company before and it's surprising how many
of the basic techniques like embedding, seed accounts, round robin
diversification are exactly the same. I used to wonder if some of the apparent
idiosyncrasies in our system were shared by other companies. It's uncanny how
much of it is industry standard.

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ticktockten
Yeah, i have come to a similar conclusion. It is also very clear that academic
papers are unless simple enough to be understood (like word2vec) they rarely
make it to production.

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eggie5
So IG ins't using collaborative filtering? The whole process starts w/ simple
NN search in the account embedding space. Those candidates are then passed to
the ranking stack.

This makes sense w/ what I see in IG recs: past behavior is strongly
reinforced w/ littler diversity. Filter Bubble/Pigeon Hole problem.

So in conclusion, I would argue that the IG explore tab doesn't have ANY
explore at all!

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ticktockten
Interesting, and looks like the present choices have evolved over time.

Seems like they are moving towards a structured RL implementation. There are
elements of it, a follow-up post on some components would be interesting.

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tanilama
Honestly...it feels pretty standard stuff.

