  Designing an e-commerce recommender system that serves hundreds of millions
of active users is a daunting challenge. From a human vision perspective,
there're two key factors that affect users' behaviors: items' attractiveness
and their matching degree with users' interests. This paper proposes Telepath,
a vision-based bionic recommender system model, which understands users from
such perspective. Telepath is a combination of a convolutional neural network
(CNN), a recurrent neural network (RNN) and deep neural networks (DNNs). Its
CNN subnetwork simulates the human vision system to extract key visual signals
of items' attractiveness and generate corresponding activations. Its RNN and
DNN subnetworks simulate cerebral cortex to understand users' interest based on
the activations generated from browsed items. In practice, the Telepath model
has been launched to JD's recommender system and advertising system. For one of
the major item recommendation blocks on the JD app, click-through rate (CTR),
gross merchandise value (GMV) and orders have increased 1.59%, 8.16% and 8.71%
respectively. For several major ads publishers of JD demand-side platform, CTR,
GMV and return on investment have increased 6.58%, 61.72% and 65.57%
respectively by the first launch, and further increased 2.95%, 41.75% and
41.37% respectively by the second launch.
