RankShift Serving ยท a plain-language tour

What this system does, in one breath

A short-video app has just shown you a clip and you watched it for 45 seconds. Will you like it, share it, comment, follow the creator, or watch it again? This system guesses โ€” as a probability, like 0.31 โ€” so the app can decide what to show next.

Why a probability and not a yes/no? Because the honest answer is almost never certain. On the data this was trained on, about 28 in 100 views get some reaction, and even the best guess only moves that to about 39 in 100 for the views it flags. The system's job is to tell you which views to pay attention to, not to read minds.

The four stations

The system is four small services. Each answers one question. Click any of them โ€” the first two run the actual model in your browser.

01 ยท ONE AT A TIME

Single prediction

Type a user, a video and how long they watched. Get the probability, how confident the model is, and whether it crosses the line the business chose.

Try it โ†’
02 ยท A HUNDRED AT ONCE

Batch prediction

Paste a table of views and score them all. One bad row costs you that row, never the whole table โ€” the failed rows carry a reason instead of a number.

Try it โ†’
03 ยท IS THE RIGHT MODEL LOADED?

Model info

Three numbers an operator checks after every deployment, and a chart that shows which inputs the model actually listens to (spoiler: mostly one).

Look โ†’
04 ยท HOW IS IT DOING TODAY?

Analytics

Is anyone calling it, is it slowing down, is it erroring, and has its output drifted? Four charts from a log the service writes about itself.

Look โ†’

Then the hard question

Once you have a model like this, the app changes how it picks videos โ€” and every number above was measured under the old way of picking. Does the model still work? Which of its numbers can you still trust? That is the research half of this site: RankShift, measured on real Kuaishou logs that happen to contain a randomized experiment. The one-line answer: the ranking still works; the probabilities do not, by a factor of two โ€” and no single fix repairs both.

If you only read one thing: "nothing" is not "zero". An empty hour has no average response time, a request that failed has no probability, a policy with no logged propensities cannot be evaluated after the fact. Every page here treats those as missing, not as 0 โ€” because 0 looks like "fine" and missing looks like "look here".