Why the “classic” ML recommendations are lacking, how to promote content on social media using multi-armed bandits, and how to take into account the context in this process. My name is Alexander Sukhochev, I work in machine learning and lead the team handling recommendations and development of VK services. I…

We had a global rebrand last October: Mail.ru Group turned into VK. This article tells about our ideas and changes. Many are aware of the brands within VK ecosystem: Mail.ru, social networks VK and OK, VK Play, GeekBrains, Skillbox, and others. …

Sometimes showing some information from your git repository right in your application can be helpful. My name is Nikolay Syrmolotov, I’m a front-end engineer at VK Pay and in this article, we’re going to take advantage of the NodeJS built-in function execSync and display three versions of the main branch…

When it comes to messages, reading is faster than listening. It’s also easier to skim through text to find and verify details. However, sometimes there are situations where it’s a lot more convenient to just send a voice message than type it all out. My name is Nadya Zueva. In…

These days, what other way is there to implement noise suppression other than neural networks? But we aren’t here to just point out the obvious and disappear into thin air. My name is Vitaly Shutov, I’m a Machine Learning Engineer at VK.com and in this article we’ll talk about the…

Introduction In recent years, there have been many papers on A/B experiments published. The vast majority of them are about statistical tests and their usage limitations. However, in this article, we are going to look at the entire process of such experiments, including data pipelines, specific data structures, and statistical procedures. …

The ability to add users as friends is one of the most important mechanics of any social network. The vast majority of interactions occur between users who are friends with each other. They see and comment on each other’s posts in their news feeds and go to their friends lists…

Hi, my name is Daniel. I’m a member of the Core ML Team at VK.com. I work on recommender systems, which is also the topic of this post. An interesting paper was presented at NeurIPS 2020: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2020/hash/019fa4fdf1c04cf73ba25aa2223769cd-Abstract.html. The main idea of it is that if you somehow preprocess the training…

Hi, everyone. I’m Anver from the CoreML team at VK, where I design and improve algorithms for news feed ranking. Improving ranking algorithms usually results in improving the click-through rates(CTRs) of users’ actions (e.g., CTR of likes, CTR of comments, etc.). We will refer to these metrics as short-term metrics. …