SMILE: SeMantic Ids Enhanced CoLd Item Representation for Click-through Rate Prediction in E-commerce SEarch

Abstract: With the rise of modern search and recommendation platforms, insufficient collaborative information of cold-start items exacerbates the Matthew effect of existing platform items, challenging platform diversity and becoming a longstanding issue. Existing methods align items' side content with collaborative information to transfer collaborative signals from high-popularity items to cold-start items. However, these methods fail to account for the asymmetry between collaboration and content, nor the fine-grained differences among items. To address these issues, we propose SMILE, an item representation enhancement approach based on fused alignment of semantic IDs. Specifically, we use RQ-OPQ encoding to quantize item content and collaborative information, followed by a two-step alignment: RQ encoding transfers shared collaborative signals across items, while OPQ encoding learns differentiated information of items. Comprehensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate superiority of SMILE, and rigorous online A/B tests confirm statistically significant improvements: item CTR +1.66%, buyers +1.57%, and order volume +2.17%.