Benchmarking for Deep Uplift Modeling in Online Marketing

Online marketing is critical for many industrial platforms and business applications, aiming to increase user engagement and platform revenue by identifying corresponding delivery-sensitive groups for specific incentives, such as coupons and bonuses. As the scale and complexity of features in industrial scenarios increase, deep uplift modeling (DUM) as a promising technique has attracted increased research from academia and industry, resulting in various predictive models. However, current DUM still lacks some standardized benchmarks and unified evaluation protocols, which limit the reproducibility of experimental results in existing studies and the practical value and potential impact in this direction. In this paper, we provide an open benchmark for DUM and present comparison results of existing models in a reproducible and uniform manner. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments on two representative industrial datasets with different preprocessing settings to re-evaluate 13 existing models. Surprisingly, our experimental results show that the most recent work differs less than expected from traditional work in many cases. In addition, our experiments also reveal the limitations of DUM in generalization, especially for different preprocessing and test distributions. Our benchmarking work allows researchers to evaluate the performance of new models quickly but also reasonably demonstrates fair comparison results with existing models. It also gives practitioners valuable insights into often overlooked considerations when deploying DUM. We will make this benchmarking library, evaluation protocol, and experimental setup available on GitHub.

Rankability-enhanced Revenue Uplift Modeling Framework for Online Marketing

Uplift modeling has been widely employed in online marketing by predicting the response difference between the treatment and control groups, so as to identify the sensitive individuals toward interventions like coupons or discounts. Compared with traditional \textit{conversion uplift modeling}, \textit{revenue uplift modeling} exhibits higher potential due to its direct connection with the corporate income. However, previous works can hardly handle the continuous long-tail response distribution in revenue uplift modeling. Moreover, they have neglected to optimize the uplift ranking among different individuals, which is actually the core of uplift modeling. To address such issues, in this paper, we first utilize the zero-inflated lognormal (ZILN) loss to regress the responses and customize the corresponding modeling network, which can be adapted to different existing uplift models. Then, we study the ranking-related uplift modeling error from the theoretical perspective and propose two tighter error bounds as the additional loss terms to the conventional response regression loss. Finally, we directly model the uplift ranking error for the entire population with a listwise uplift ranking loss. The experiment results on offline public and industrial datasets validate the effectiveness of our method for revenue uplift modeling. Furthermore, we conduct large-scale experiments on a prominent online fintech marketing platform, Tencent FiT, which further demonstrates the superiority of our method in practical applications.

Touch the Core: Exploring Task Dependence Among Hybrid Targets for Recommendation

As user behaviors become complicated on business platforms, online recommendations focus more on how to touch the core conversions, which are highly related to the interests of platforms. These core conversions are usually continuous targets, such as \textit{watch time}, \textit{revenue}, and so on, whose predictions can be enhanced by previous discrete conversion actions. Therefore, multi-task learning (MTL) can be adopted as the paradigm to learn these hybrid targets. However, existing works mainly emphasize investigating the sequential dependence among discrete conversion actions, which neglects the complexity of dependence between discrete conversions and the final continuous conversion. Moreover, simultaneously optimizing hybrid tasks with stronger task dependence will suffer from volatile issues where the core regression task might have a larger influence on other tasks. In this paper, we study the MTL problem with hybrid targets for the first time and propose the model named Hybrid Targets Learning Network (HTLNet) to explore task dependence and enhance optimization. Specifically, we introduce label embedding for each task to explicitly transfer the label information among these tasks, which can effectively explore logical task dependence. We also further design the gradient adjustment regime between the final regression task and other classification tasks to enhance the optimization. Extensive experiments on two offline public datasets and one real-world industrial dataset are conducted to validate the effectiveness of HTLNet. Moreover, online A/B tests on the financial recommender system also show our model has superior improvement.

Treatment-Aware Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Causal Effect Estimation with Social Networks

Estimating the individual treatment effect (ITE) from observational data is a crucial research topic that holds significant value across multiple domains. How to identify hidden confounders poses a key challenge in ITE estimation. Recent studies have incorporated the structural information of social networks to tackle this challenge, achieving notable advancements. However, these methods utilize graph neural networks to learn the representation of hidden confounders in Euclidean space, disregarding two critical issues: (1) the social networks often exhibit a scalefree structure, while Euclidean embeddings suffer from high distortion when used to embed such graphs, and (2) each ego-centric network within a social network manifests a treatment-related characteristic, implying significant patterns of hidden confounders. To address these issues, we propose a novel method called Treatment-Aware Hyperbolic Representation Learning (TAHyper). Firstly, TAHyper employs the hyperbolic space to encode the social networks, thereby effectively reducing the distortion of confounder representation caused by Euclidean embeddings. Secondly, we design a treatment-aware relationship identification module that enhances the representation of hidden confounders by identifying whether an individual and her neighbors receive the same treatment. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospects

Intelligent agents stand out as a potential path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Thus, researchers have dedicated significant effort to diverse implementations for them. Benefiting from recent progress in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents that use universal natural language as an interface exhibit robust generalization capabilities across various applications -- from serving as autonomous general-purpose task assistants to applications in coding, social, and economic domains, LLM-based agents offer extensive exploration opportunities. This paper surveys current research to provide an in-depth overview of LLM-based intelligent agents within single-agent and multi-agent systems. It covers their definitions, research frameworks, and foundational components such as their composition, cognitive and planning methods, tool utilization, and responses to environmental feedback. We also delve into the mechanisms of deploying LLM-based agents in multi-agent systems, including multi-role collaboration, message passing, and strategies to alleviate communication issues between agents. The discussions also shed light on popular datasets and application scenarios. We conclude by envisioning prospects for LLM-based agents, considering the evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing.

Expected Transaction Value Optimization for Precise Marketing in FinTech Platforms

FinTech platforms facilitated by digital payments are watching growth rapidly, which enable the distribution of mutual funds personalized to individual investors via mobile Apps. As the important intermediation of financial products investment, these platforms distribute thousands of mutual funds obtaining impressions under guaranteed delivery (GD) strategy required by fund companies. Driven by the profit from fund purchases of users, the platform aims to maximize each transaction amount of customers by promoting mutual funds to these investors who will be interested in. Different from the conversions in traditional advertising or e-commerce recommendations, the investment amount in each purchase varies greatly even for the same financial product, which provides a significant challenge for the promotion recommendation of mutual funds. In addition to predicting the click-through rate (CTR) or the conversion rate (CVR) as in traditional recommendations, it is essential for FinTech platforms to estimate the customers' purchase amount for each delivered fund and achieve an effective allocation of impressions based on the predicted results to optimize the total expected transaction value (ETV). In this paper, we propose an ETV optimized customer allocation framework (EOCA) that aims to maximize the total ETV of recommended funds, under the constraints of GD dealt with fund companies. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first attempt to solve the GD problem for financial product promotions based on customer purchase amount prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on large scale real-world datasets and online tests based on LiCaiTong, Tencent wealth management platform, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed EOCA framework.

Towards Hybrid-grained Feature Interaction Selection for Deep Sparse Network

Deep sparse networks are widely investigated as a neural network architecture for prediction tasks with high-dimensional sparse features, with which feature interaction selection is a critical component. While previous methods primarily focus on how to search feature interaction in a coarse-grained space, less attention has been given to a finer granularity. In this work, we introduce a hybrid-grained feature interaction selection approach that targets both feature field and feature value for deep sparse networks. To explore such expansive space, we propose a decomposed space which is calculated on the fly. We then develop a selection algorithm called OptFeature, which efficiently selects the feature interaction from both the feature field and the feature value simultaneously. Results from experiments on three large real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that OptFeature performs well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Additional studies support the feasibility of our method.

OptMSM: Optimizing Multi-Scenario Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction

A large-scale industrial recommendation platform typically consists of multiple associated scenarios, requiring a unified click-through rate (CTR) prediction model to serve them simultaneously. Existing approaches for multi-scenario CTR prediction generally consist of two main modules: i) a scenario-aware learning module that learns a set of multi-functional representations with scenario-shared and scenario-specific information from input features, and ii) a scenario-specific prediction module that serves each scenario based on these representations. However, most of these approaches primarily focus on improving the former module and neglect the latter module. This can result in challenges such as increased model parameter size, training difficulty, and performance bottlenecks for each scenario. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called OptMSM (\textbf{Opt}imizing \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{S}cenario \textbf{M}odeling). First, we introduce a simplified yet effective scenario-enhanced learning module to alleviate the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, we partition the input features into scenario-specific and scenario-shared features, which are mapped to specific information embedding encodings and a set of shared information embeddings, respectively. By imposing an orthogonality constraint on the shared information embeddings to facilitate the disentanglement of shared information corresponding to each scenario, we combine them with the specific information embeddings to obtain multi-functional representations. Second, we introduce a scenario-specific hypernetwork in the scenario-specific prediction module to capture interactions within each scenario more effectively, thereby alleviating the performance bottlenecks. Finally, we conduct extensive offline experiments and an online A/B test to demonstrate the effectiveness of OptMSM.

Explicit Feature Interaction-aware Uplift Network for Online Marketing

As a key component in online marketing, uplift modeling aims to accurately capture the degree to which different treatments motivate different users, such as coupons or discounts, also known as the estimation of individual treatment effect (ITE). In an actual business scenario, the options for treatment may be numerous and complex, and there may be correlations between different treatments. In addition, each marketing instance may also have rich user and contextual features. However, existing methods still fall short in both fully exploiting treatment information and mining features that are sensitive to a particular treatment. In this paper, we propose an explicit feature interaction-aware uplift network (EFIN) to address these two problems. Our EFIN includes four customized modules: 1) a feature encoding module encodes not only the user and contextual features, but also the treatment features; 2) a self-interaction module aims to accurately model the user's natural response with all but the treatment features; 3) a treatment-aware interaction module accurately models the degree to which a particular treatment motivates a user through interactions between the treatment features and other features, i.e., ITE; and 4) an intervention constraint module is used to balance the ITE distribution of users between the control and treatment groups so that the model would still achieve a accurate uplift ranking on data collected from a non-random intervention marketing scenario. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets and one product dataset to verify the effectiveness of our EFIN. In addition, our EFIN has been deployed in a credit card bill payment scenario of a large online financial platform with a significant improvement.

Curriculum Modeling the Dependence among Targets with Multi-task Learning for Financial Marketing

Multi-task learning for various real-world applications usually involves tasks with logical sequential dependence. For example, in online marketing, the cascade behavior pattern of $impression \rightarrow click \rightarrow conversion$ is usually modeled as multiple tasks in a multi-task manner, where the sequential dependence between tasks is simply connected with an explicitly defined function or implicitly transferred information in current works. These methods alleviate the data sparsity problem for long-path sequential tasks as the positive feedback becomes sparser along with the task sequence. However, the error accumulation and negative transfer will be a severe problem for downstream tasks. Especially, at the beginning stage of training, the optimization for parameters of former tasks is not converged yet, and thus the information transferred to downstream tasks is negative. In this paper, we propose a prior information merged model (\textbf{PIMM}), which explicitly models the logical dependence among tasks with a novel prior information merged (\textbf{PIM}) module for multiple sequential dependence task learning in a curriculum manner. Specifically, the PIM randomly selects the true label information or the prior task prediction with a soft sampling strategy to transfer to the downstream task during the training. Following an easy-to-difficult curriculum paradigm, we dynamically adjust the sampling probability to ensure that the downstream task will get the effective information along with the training. The offline experimental results on both public and product datasets verify that PIMM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, we deploy the PIMM in a large-scale FinTech platform, and the online experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of PIMM.