Research

Working Papers

• Beyond Black-Box: Structuring Landing Page Recommender Systems Using Predicted Intents.

Yuyan Wang, Cheenar Banerjee, Samer Chucri, Minmin Chen.

- Winner of Steven Shugan Best Junior Faculty Paper Award at AI in Management Conference (AIM 2025).

- Short version accepted by the Actionable Interpretability Workshop at ICML 2025.

- 2nd round revision at Management Science.

- Media coverage: Stanford Report-1, Stanford Report-2, Insights by Stanford Business.

• Can Explanations Improve Recommendations? Evidence from Prediction-Informed Explanations.

Yuyan Wang, Pan Li, Minmin Chen. 

- Finalist for Best Paper Award at AI in Management Conference (AIM 2025).

- Short version accepted by the Efficient Reasoning Workshop at NeurIPS 2025.

- 1st round revision at Management Science.

• Can Psychological Heuristics Enable Long-Term Optimization? Evidence from Short-Form Video Recommendations.

Yuyan Wang, Jing Zhong, Yuxin Cui, Zhaohui Gao.

- Short version accepted at Recsys 2025 as spotlight oral presentation (<10%). 

- 1st round revision at Journal of Marketing Research.

Journal Publications

• Recommending for a Multi-Sided Marketplace: A Multi-Objective Hierarchical Approach.

Yuyan Wang, Long Tao, Xian Xing Zhang.

Marketing Science. 

- Lead article. 

- Best Paper Award at CIST 2022. 

- Media coverage: Stanford Report, Insights By Stanford Business.

• Embracing the Blessing of Dimensionality in Factor Models.

Quefeng Li, Guang Cheng, Jianqing Fan, Yuyan Wang.

Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), 113.521 (2018): 380-389.

• A statistical investigation of the dependence of tropical cyclone intensity change on the surrounding environment.

Ning Lin, Renzhi Jing, Yuyan Wang, Emmi Yonekura, Jianqing Fan, and Lingzhou Xue.

Monthly Weather Review - American Meteorological Society (AMS), 145 (7), 2813-2831.

• Estimation of High-Dimensional Mean Regression in Absence of Symmetry and Light-tail Assumptions.

Jianqing Fan, Quefeng Li, Yuyan Wang (alphabetical order).

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) (JRSS-B) 79.1 (2017): 247-265.

Conference Publications

• Not All Impressions Are Created Equal: Psychology-Informed Retention Optimization for Short-Form Video Recommendation.

Yuyan Wang, Can Xu, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Accepted by Recsys 2025.

- Top conference for Recommender Systems. Spotlight oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 10.0%. 

• Beyond Item Dissimilarities: Diversifying by Intent in Recommender Systems.

Yuyan Wang, Can Xu, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Accepted by KDD 2025.

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 22.0%. Short version accepted to BayLearn 2024.

• Latent User Intent Modeling for Sequential Recommenders.

Bo Chang, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Yuyan Wang, Can Xu, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (WWW / theWebConf 2023).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 19.8%. 

• Surrogate for Long-Term User Experience in Recommender Systems.

Yuyan Wang, Mohit Sharma, Sriraj Badam, Can Xu, Qian Sun, Lee Richardson, Lisa Chung, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2022).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 15.0%. Short version accepted to BayLearn 2022.

• Recommending for a Multi-Sided Marketplace with Heterogeneous Contents.

Yuyan Wang, Long Tao, Xian Xing Zhang.

Sixteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Recsys 2022).

- Top conference for Recommender Systems. Extended abstract with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 28.0%.

• Can Small Heads Help? Understanding and Improving Multi-Task Generalization.

Yuyan Wang, Mohit Sharma, Sriraj Badam, Can Xu, Qian Sun, Lee Richardson, Lisa Chung, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (WWW / theWebConf 2022).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 17.7%.

• Learning to Augment for Casual User Recommendation.

Jianling Wang, Elaine Le, Bo Chang, Yuyan Wang, Ed H. Chi, Minmin Chen.

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (WWW / theWebConf 2022).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 17.7%.

• Understanding and Improving Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Multi-Task Learning.

Yuyan Wang, Xuezhi Wang, Alex Beutel, Flabien Prost, Jilin Chen, Ed H. Chi.

Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2021).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 15.4%. Short version accepted to BayLearn 2021.

• Values of User Exploration in Recommender Systems.

Minmin Chen, Yuyan Wang, Can Xu, Elaine Le, Mohit Sharma, Lee Richardson, Su-Lin Wu, Ed Chi.

Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Recsys 2021).Top conference for Recommender Systems. 

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 18.4%.

• Beyond Point Estimate: Inferring Ensemble Prediction Variation from Neuron Activation Strength in Recommender Systems.

Zhe Chen, Yuyan Wang, Dong Lin, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Lichan Hong, Ed Chi, Claire Cui.

Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2021).

- Full paper with oral presentation; Acceptance rate: 18.6%.

Patents & Blog posts

• Multi-layer Optimization for a Multi-sided Network Service.

Yuyan Wang, Xian Xing Zhang, Isaac Suyu Liu, Yuanchi Ning, Chen Peng.

U.S. Patent No. 11,127,066. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• Optimizing listing efficiency and efficacy for a delivery coordination system.

Xian Xing Zhang, Sidney Zhang, Yuyan Wang, Mihir Gogate, Yuanchi Ning, Chen Peng, Isaac Liu, Calvin Lee.

U.S. Patent No. 11,157,579. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• Food Discovery with Uber Eats: Recommending for the Marketplace.

Yuyan Wang, Yuanchi Ning, Isaac Liu, and Xian Xing Zhang.

Uber Engineering Blog.

- Selected as "Top 10 machine learning articles of the month" (0.7%) by an independent publisher.