# Personalized Transformer-based Ranking for e-Commerce at Yandex

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03481 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03481/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unidentified and Confounded? Understanding Two-Tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20501/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalizing user experience with high-quality recommendations based on user activity is vital for e-commerce platforms. This is particularly important in scenarios where the user's intent is not explicit, such as on the homepage. Recently, personalized embedding-based systems have significantly improved the quality of recommendations and search in the e-commerce domain. However, most of these works focus on enhancing the retrieval stage. In this paper, we demonstrate that features produced by retrieval-focused deep learning models are sub-optimal for ranking stage in e-commerce recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training process that fine-tunes two-tower models to achieve optimal ranking performance. We provide a detailed description of our transformer-based two-tower model architecture, which is specifically designed for personalization in e-commerce. Additionally, we introduce a novel technique for debiasing context in offline models and report significant improvements in ranking performance when using web-search queries for e-commerce recommendations. Our model has been successfully deployed at Yandex, serves millions of users daily, and has delivered strong performance in online A/B testing.