Bridging the Product & Research gap – Part I: Demystifying Product for Researchers
February 4, 2025 11:07 amDeveloping innovative products play an essential part of Spotify’s success...
Categories for Machine Learning
Contextualized Recommendations Through Personalized Narratives using LLMs
December 18, 2024 4:59 pmGenerative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), offers new opportunities to connect listeners...
PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters
October 24, 2024 10:30 amListeners often find it challenging to navigate long podcast episodes due to their long duration...
Personalizing Audiobooks and Podcasts with graph-based models
May 10, 2024 10:42 amSpotify's catalog includes millions of music tracks and podcasts and has recently expanded to Audiobooks. Personalizing this content to users requires our algorithms to “understand” user preferences as well as content relationships across all content types...
In-context Exploration-Exploitation for Reinforcement Learning
May 7, 2024 9:33 amMachine learning (ML) models are widely used on Spotify to provide users with a daily personalized listening experience.
Accelerating Creator Audience Building through Centralized Exploration
February 23, 2024 9:32 amTL;DR: Across a broad spectrum of product features, Spotify’s array of recommender systems play a pivotal role in tailoring personalized user experiences and helping creators grow.
Which Witch? Artist name disambiguation and catalog curation using audio and metadata
November 17, 2023 1:05 pmWe developed a Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) method to assist human curators in finding and correcting infrequent errors in a music catalog.
LLark: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Music
October 13, 2023 10:49 amEvery day, music is enjoyed, created, and discovered by billions of people around the globe – and yet, existing AI systems largely struggle to model the nuances that make music different from other forms of audio.
Audio-based Machine Learning Model for Podcast Language Identification
August 18, 2023 10:27 amExisting spoken Language Identification (SLI) solutions focus on detecting languages from short audio clips. Podcast audio, on the other hand, poses peculiar challenges...
Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay
July 24, 2023 8:55 amTL;DR: On online platforms such as Spotify, recommender systems are increasingly tasked with improving users’ long-term satisfaction...
Automatic Music Playlist Generation via Simulation-based Reinforcement Learning
July 19, 2023 4:45 pmReinforcement learning (RL) is an established tool for sequential decision making. In this work, we apply RL to solve an automatic music playlist generation problem...
Answering counterfactual “what-if” questions in a trustworthy and efficient manner
April 20, 2023 12:56 pmAnswering causal questions with machine learning algorithms is a challenging yet critical task.
Estimating long-term effects when only short-run experiments are available
April 6, 2023 8:57 amQuantifying cause and effect relationships is of fundamental importance in many fields, from medicine to economics. The gold standard solution to this problem is to conduct randomised controlled trials, or A/B tests.
Gaining confidence in synthetic control causal inference with sensitivity analysis
April 5, 2023 11:13 amUnderstanding cause and effect relationships in Spotify data to inform decision-making is crucial for best serving Spotify’s users and the company.
Users’ interests are multi-faceted: recommendation models should be too
February 22, 2023 10:58 amA new approach to calibrating recommendations to user interests. Users’ interests are multi-faceted and representing different aspects of users’ interest in their recommendations is an important factor for recommender systems....
Survival Analysis Meets Reinforcement Learning
November 25, 2022 10:08 amTL;DR: Survival analysis provides a framework to reason about time-to-event data; at Spotify, for example, we use it to understand and predict the way users might engage with Spotify in the future. In this work, we bring temporal-difference learning, a central idea in reinforcement learning, to survival analysis. We develop a new algorithm that trains a survival model from sequential data by leveraging a temporal consistency condition, and show that it outperforms direct regression on observed outcomes......
Spotify’s Contributions to NeurIPS 2022
November 24, 2022 11:08 amCutting-edge research in Machine Learning, Language Technologies, User Modeling, Audio Intelligence, Search and Recommender Systems are some of the key areas we feel incredibly enthusiastic about at Spotify...
Can we correctly attribute changes among many possible causes when unobserved confounders are present?
November 24, 2022 11:06 amThere are many A/B tests we might like to run, but which are too technically challenging, risky in terms of user impact or even impossible to perform. For instance, in the classic example of whether smoking causes lung cancer, forcing a randomly selected group of people to smoke is unethical if we believe it might damage their health. In the context of technology companies, if we want to understand if app crashes cause users to churn, we would have to randomly select a subgroup of users and crash their apps on purpose – not something we would want to consider given we do not want to break their trust....
Scalable Dynamic Topic Modeling
November 15, 2022 12:51 pmDynamic topic modeling is a well established tool for capturing the temporal dynamics of the topics of a corpus....
Unsupervised Speaker Diarization using Sparse Optimization
September 29, 2022 11:08 amWhat is Speaker Diarization? Speaker diarization is the process of logging the timestamps of when various speakers take turns to talk...
Identifying Promising New Podcasts
September 22, 2022 9:05 amA large number of new podcasts are launched every month on Spotify and other online media platforms. In this work,... View Article
Spotify’s Contributions to RecSys 2022
September 14, 2022 2:12 pmHere at Spotify, we are highly dedicated to cutting-edge research in various areas in Machine Learning, User Modeling, Personalization, and... View Article
The Contribution of Lyrics and Acoustics to Collaborative Understanding of Mood
July 19, 2022 2:49 pmSong lyrics make an important contribution to the musical experience, providing us with rich stories and messages that artists want... View Article
Modeling Users According to Their Slow and Fast-Moving Interests
February 21, 2022 4:10 pmMusic recommendation systems at Spotify are built on models of users and items. They often rely on past user interactions... View Article