No Arabic abstract
Recently, click-through rate (CTR) prediction models have evolved from shallow methods to deep neural networks. Most deep CTR models follow an Embedding&MLP paradigm, that is, first mapping discrete id features, e.g. user visited items, into low dimensional vectors with an embedding module, then learn a multi-layer perception (MLP) to fit the target. In this way, embedding module performs as the representative learning and plays a key role in the model performance. However, in many real-world applications, deep CTR model often suffers from poor generalization performance, which is mostly due to the learning of embedding parameters. In this paper, we model user behavior using an interest delay model, study carefully the embedding mechanism, and obtain two important results: (i) We theoretically prove that small aggregation radius of embedding vectors of items which belongs to a same user interest domain will result in good generalization performance of deep CTR model. (ii) Following our theoretical analysis, we design a new embedding structure named res-embedding. In res-embedding module, embedding vector of each item is the sum of two components: (i) a central embedding vector calculated from an item-based interest graph (ii) a residual embedding vector with its scale to be relatively small. Empirical evaluation on several public datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed res-embedding structure, which brings significant improvement on the model performance.
Click-through rate (CTR) estimation plays as a core function module in various personalized online services, including online advertising, recommender systems, and web search etc. From 2015, the success of deep learning started to benefit CTR estimation performance and now deep CTR models have been widely applied in many industrial platforms. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of deep learning models for CTR estimation tasks. First, we take a review of the transfer from shallow to deep CTR models and explain why going deep is a necessary trend of development. Second, we concentrate on explicit feature interaction learning modules of deep CTR models. Then, as an important perspective on large platforms with abundant user histories, deep behavior models are discussed. Moreover, the recently emerged automated methods for deep CTR architecture design are presented. Finally, we summarize the survey and discuss the future prospects of this field.
Cross domain recommender system constitutes a powerful method to tackle the cold-start and sparsity problem by aggregating and transferring user preferences across multiple category domains. Therefore, it has great potential to improve click-through-rate prediction performance in online commerce platforms having many domains of products. While several cross domain sequential recommendation models have been proposed to leverage information from a source domain to improve CTR predictions in a target domain, they did not take into account bidirectional latent relations of user preferences across source-target domain pairs. As such, they cannot provide enhanced cross-domain CTR predictions for both domains simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to cross-domain sequential recommendations based on the dual learning mechanism that simultaneously transfers information between two related domains in an iterative manner until the learning process stabilizes. In particular, the proposed Dual Attentive Sequential Learning (DASL) model consists of two novel components Dual Embedding and Dual Attention, which jointly establish the two-stage learning process: we first construct dual latent embeddings that extract user preferences in both domains simultaneously, and subsequently provide cross-domain recommendations by matching the extracted latent embeddings with candidate items through dual-attention learning mechanism. We conduct extensive offline experiments on three real-world datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model, which significantly and consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines across all experimental settings. We also conduct an online A/B test at a major video streaming platform Alibaba-Youku, where our proposed model significantly improves business performance over the latest production system in the company.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. Most existing methods mainly model the feature-CTR relationship and suffer from the data sparsity issue. In this paper, we propose DeepMCP, which models other types of relationships in order to learn more informative and statistically reliable feature representations, and in consequence to improve the performance of CTR prediction. In particular, DeepMCP contains three parts: a matching subnet, a correlation subnet and a prediction subnet. These subnets model the user-ad, ad-ad and feature-CTR relationship respectively. When these subnets are jointly optimized under the supervision of the target labels, the learned feature representations have both good prediction powers and good representation abilities. Experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that DeepMCP outperforms several state-of-the-art models for CTR prediction.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the most central tasks in online advertising systems. Recent deep learning-based models that exploit feature embedding and high-order data nonlinearity have shown dramatic successes in CTR prediction. However, these models work poorly on cold-start ads with new IDs, whose embeddings are not well learned yet. In this paper, we propose Graph Meta Embedding (GME) models that can rapidly learn how to generate desirable initial embeddings for new ad IDs based on graph neural networks and meta learning. Previous works address this problem from the new ad itself, but ignore possibly useful information contained in existing old ads. In contrast, GMEs simultaneously consider two information sources: the new ad and existing old ads. For the new ad, GMEs exploit its associated attributes. For existing old ads, GMEs first build a graph to connect them with new ads, and then adaptively distill useful information. We propose three specific GMEs from different perspectives to explore what kind of information to use and how to distill information. In particular, GME-P uses Pre-trained neighbor ID embeddings, GME-G uses Generated neighbor ID embeddings and GME-A uses neighbor Attributes. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that GMEs can significantly improve the prediction performance in both cold-start (i.e., no training data is available) and warm-up (i.e., a small number of training samples are collected) scenarios over five major deep learning-based CTR prediction models. GMEs can be applied to conversion rate (CVR) prediction as well.
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.