End-to-end training of Multimodal Model and ranking Model

Traditional recommender systems heavily rely on ID features, which often encounter challenges related to cold-start and generalization. Modeling pre-extracted content features can mitigate these issues, but is still a suboptimal solution due to the discrepancies between training tasks and model parameters. End-to-end training presents a promising solution for these problems, yet most of the existing works mainly focus on retrieval models, leaving the multimodal techniques under-utilized. In this paper, we propose an industrial multimodal recommendation framework named EM3: End-to-end training of Multimodal Model and ranking Model, which sufficiently utilizes multimodal information and allows personalized ranking tasks to directly train the core modules in the multimodal model to obtain more task-oriented content features, without overburdening resource consumption. First, we propose Fusion-Q-Former, which consists of transformers and a set of trainable queries, to fuse different modalities and generate fixed-length and robust multimodal embeddings. Second, in our sequential modeling for user content interest, we utilize Low-Rank Adaptation technique to alleviate the conflict between huge resource consumption and long sequence length. Third, we propose a novel Content-ID-Contrastive learning task to complement the advantages of content and ID by aligning them with each other, obtaining more task-oriented content embeddings and more generalized ID embeddings. In experiments, we implement EM3 on different ranking models in two scenario, achieving significant improvements in both offline evaluation and online A/B test, verifying the generalizability of our method. Ablation studies and visualization are also performed. Furthermore, we also conduct experiments on two public datasets to show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Graph Meta Embeddings for Cold-Start Ads in Click-Through Rate 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.

MiNet: Mixed Interest Network for Cross-Domain Click-Through Rate Prediction

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.

Click-Through Rate Prediction with the User Memory Network

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).

Representation Learning-Assisted Click-Through Rate Prediction

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.

Deep Spatio-Temporal Neural Networks for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. A large body of research considers each ad independently, but ignores its relationship to other ads that may impact the CTR. In this paper, we investigate various types of auxiliary ads for improving the CTR prediction of the target ad. In particular, we explore auxiliary ads from two viewpoints: one is from the spatial domain, where we consider the contextual ads shown above the target ad on the same page; the other is from the temporal domain, where we consider historically clicked and unclicked ads of the user. The intuitions are that ads shown together may influence each other, clicked ads reflect a user's preferences, and unclicked ads may indicate what a user dislikes to certain extent. In order to effectively utilize these auxiliary data, we propose the Deep Spatio-Temporal neural Networks (DSTNs) for CTR prediction. Our model is able to learn the interactions between each type of auxiliary data and the target ad, to emphasize more important hidden information, and to fuse heterogeneous data in a unified framework. Offline experiments on one public dataset and two industrial datasets show that DSTNs outperform several state-of-the-art methods for CTR prediction. We have deployed the best-performing DSTN in Shenma Search, which is the second largest search engine in China. The A/B test results show that the online CTR is also significantly improved compared to our last serving model.