WeFair: Fidelity-Aware Alignment from Human Feedback for Personalized Query Rewriting in Short-Video Search
Abstract
WeFair improves personalized query rewriting via fidelity-aware human feedback stagesādemonstration, preference, and verificationāto reduce intent drift and boost search effectiveness in short-video platforms.
Short-video search needs compact query rewriters that recover users' personalized intent from ambiguous queries under strict latency constraints. Existing LLM-based methods have improved rewriting by using synthetic reasoning and subsequent consumption-behavioral feedback. However, overemphasizing subsequent consumption can favor engaging content over the user's immediate need, causing intent drift even when rewritten queries are grounded in behavioral history. We propose WeFair, Fidelity-Aware Alignment from Human Feedback for Personalized Query Rewriting in WeChat short-video search. WeFair uses human feedback according to how directly it reflects personalized intent, assigning feedback fidelity to a progression from demonstration to preference to verification. We first mine actual queries and user reformulations from search sessions, and then screen them for contextual support. In the demonstration stage, a supervised fine-tuning curriculum progresses from large-scale context-to-query learning to reasoning and direct prediction on human reformulation and preservation. In the preference stage, direct preference optimization learns relative preferences from subsequent consumption feedback. In the verification stage, group relative policy optimization rewards exact agreement with reformulation or preservation targets to constrain intent drift. Further analysis shows that broad supervision benefits the full curriculum supervised training, while strict verification achieves better performance than auxiliary rewards. In offline experiments, WeFair-2B outperforms strong rewriting baselines in overall accuracy and intent preservation. An online A/B test shows relative increases of 2.593% in effective video-view rate and a 2.350% relative reduction in query reformulation rate. WeFair-2B has been deployed in the WeChat short-video search system, which serves over 100 million queries per day.
Community
Personalization should clarify user intent, not overwrite it.
How can we build a compact query rewriter that understands users' personalized intent while avoiding intent drift?
We introduce WeFair, a fidelity-aware alignment framework for personalized query rewriting in short-video search. The key idea is to align different types of human feedback with different stages of training:
- Demonstration (SFT): Learn from large-scale search-session data and real user reformulations.
- Preference (DPO): Capture user preferences from subsequent consumption behavior.
- Verification (GRPO): Use exact human reformulations and preservation targets to enforce intent fidelity.
One of our key findings is that richer behavioral rewards do not necessarily lead to more faithful rewriting. Strict, verifiable human feedback proves more effective for preventing intent drift during on-policy optimization.
Results are encouraging:
- WeFair-2B outperforms strong baselines in offline overall accuracy and intent preservation.
- Online A/B testing achieves a +2.593% relative lift in effective video-view rate and a 2.350% relative reduction in query reformulation rate.
- The model is deployed in WeChat short-video search, serving 100M+ queries per day.
We hope this work offers useful insights into building efficient, reliable, and intent-faithful language models for real-world search systems.
š Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16927v2
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