No Arabic abstract
Click-Through Rate prediction is an important task in recommender systems, which aims to estimate the probability of a user to click on a given item. Recently, many deep models have been proposed to learn low-order and high-order feature interactions from original features. However, since useful interactions are always sparse, it is difficult for DNN to learn them effectively under a large number of parameters. In real scenarios, artificial features are able to improve the performance of deep models (such as Wide & Deep Learning), but feature engineering is expensive and requires domain knowledge, making it impractical in different scenarios. Therefore, it is necessary to augment feature space automatically. In this paper, We propose a novel Feature Generation by Convolutional Neural Network (FGCNN) model with two components: Feature Generation and Deep Classifier. Feature Generation leverages the strength of CNN to generate local patterns and recombine them to generate new features. Deep Classifier adopts the structure of IPNN to learn interactions from the augmented feature space. Experimental results on three large-scale datasets show that FGCNN significantly outperforms nine state-of-the-art models. Moreover, when applying some state-of-the-art models as Deep Classifier, better performance is always achieved, showing the great compatibility of our FGCNN model. This work explores a novel direction for CTR predictions: it is quite useful to reduce the learning difficulties of DNN by automatically identifying important features.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is one of the most important machine learning tasks in recommender systems, driving personalized experience for billions of consumers. Neural architecture search (NAS), as an emerging field, has demonstrated its capabilities in discovering powerful neural network architectures, which motivates us to explore its potential for CTR predictions. Due to 1) diverse unstructured feature interactions, 2) heterogeneous feature space, and 3) high data volume and intrinsic data randomness, it is challenging to construct, search, and compare different architectures effectively for recommendation models. To address these challenges, we propose an automated interaction architecture discovering framework for CTR prediction named AutoCTR. Via modularizing simple yet representative interactions as virtual building blocks and wiring them into a space of direct acyclic graphs, AutoCTR performs evolutionary architecture exploration with learning-to-rank guidance at the architecture level and achieves acceleration using low-fidelity model. Empirical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoCTR on different datasets comparing to human-crafted architectures. The discovered architecture also enjoys generalizability and transferability among different datasets.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. Models like Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are simple but stateless. They consider each target ad independently and cannot directly extract useful information contained in users historical ad impressions and clicks. In contrast, models like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are stateful but complex. They model temporal dependency between users sequential behaviors and can achieve improved prediction performance than DNNs. However, both the offline training and online prediction process of RNNs are much more complex and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose Memory Augmented DNN (MA-DNN) for practical CTR prediction services. In particular, we create two external memory vectors for each user, memorizing high-level abstractions of what a user possibly likes and dislikes. The proposed MA-DNN achieves a good compromise between DNN and RNN. It is as simple as DNN, but has certain ability to exploit useful information contained in users historical behaviors as RNN. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MA-DNN for practical CTR prediction services. Actually, the memory component can be augmented to other models as well (e.g., the Wide&Deep model).
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. Existing works mainly address the single-domain CTR prediction problem and model aspects such as feature interaction, user behavior history and contextual information. Nevertheless, ads are usually displayed with natural content, which offers an opportunity for cross-domain CTR prediction. In this paper, we address this problem and leverage auxiliary data from a source domain to improve the CTR prediction performance of a target domain. Our study is based on UC Toutiao (a news feed service integrated with the UC Browser App, serving hundreds of millions of users daily), where the source domain is the news and the target domain is the ad. In order to effectively leverage news data for predicting CTRs of ads, we propose the Mixed Interest Network (MiNet) which jointly models three types of user interest: 1) long-term interest across domains, 2) short-term interest from the source domain and 3) short-term interest in the target domain. MiNet contains two levels of attentions, where the item-level attention can adaptively distill useful information from clicked news / ads and the interest-level attention can adaptively fuse different interest representations. Offline experiments show that MiNet outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for CTR prediction. We have deployed MiNet in UC Toutiao and the A/B test results show that the online CTR is also improved substantially. MiNet now serves the main ad traffic in UC Toutiao.
Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent industrial Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction models have made the transition from traditional shallow approaches to deep approaches. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known for its ability to learn non-linear interactions from raw feature automatically, however, the non-linear feature interaction is learned in an implicit manner. The non-linear interaction may be hard to capture and explicitly model the textit{co-action} of raw feature is beneficial for CTR prediction. textit{Co-action} refers to the collective effects of features toward final prediction. In this paper, we argue that current CTR models do not fully explore the potential of feature co-action. We conduct experiments and show that the effect of feature co-action is underestimated seriously. Motivated by our observation, we propose feature Co-Action Network (CAN) to explore the potential of feature co-action. The proposed model can efficiently and effectively capture the feature co-action, which improves the model performance while reduce the storage and computation consumption. Experiment results on public and industrial datasets show that CAN outperforms state-of-the-art CTR models by a large margin. Up to now, CAN has been deployed in the Alibaba display advertisement system, obtaining averaging 12% improvement on CTR and 8% on RPM.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, whose aim is to predict the probability of whether a user will click on an item, is an essential task for many online applications. Due to the nature of data sparsity and high dimensionality of CTR prediction, a key to making effective prediction is to model high-order feature interaction. An efficient way to do this is to perform inner product of feature embeddings with self-attentive neural networks. To better model complex feature interaction, in this paper we propose a novel DisentanglEd Self-atTentIve NEtwork (DESTINE) framework for CTR prediction that explicitly decouples the computation of unary feature importance from pairwise interaction. Specifically, the unary term models the general importance of one feature on all other features, whereas the pairwise interaction term contributes to learning the pure impact for each feature pair. We conduct extensive experiments using two real-world benchmark datasets. The results show that DESTINE not only maintains computational efficiency but achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.