ZoRRO: A Zero-Weight Personalized Recommender System for Scalable News Recommendation

Abstract

We present ZoRRO (Zero-Weight Personalized Recommender System), a zero-weight, training-free framework for personalized news recommendation designed for scalable real-world deployment. ZoRRO outperforms strong neural baselines in offline ranking evaluations and achieves click-through rate performance in online A/B testing that is nearly on par with a state-of-the-art deep learning model, while operating more than 600 times faster. Our experiments reveal gaps between offline and online performance and demonstrate that models with similar click-through rate outcomes can produce markedly different recommendation distributions, thereby influencing the overall news flow. These findings position ZoRRO as a practical and efficient solution for large-scale news recommendation and highlight the importance of evaluating recommender systems using metrics beyond accuracy alone.

6 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '26), Melbourne, Australia, July 20-24, 2026. Code available at https://github.com/johanneskruse/zorro

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