Feature selection has been an essential step in developing industry-scale deep Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction systems. The goal of neural feature selection (NFS) is to choose a relatively small subset of features with the best explanatory power as a means to remove redundant features and reduce computational cost. Inspired by gradient-based neural architecture search (NAS) and network pruning methods, people have tackled the NFS problem with Gating approach that inserts a set of differentiable binary gates to drop less informative features. The binary gates are optimized along with the network parameters in an efficient end-to-end manner. In this paper, we analyze the gradient-based solution from an exploration-exploitation perspective and use empirical results to show that Gating approach might suffer from insufficient exploration. To improve the exploration capacity of gradient-based solutions, we propose a simple but effective ensemble learning approach, named Ensemble Gating. We choose two public datasets, namely Avazu and Criteo, to evaluate this approach. Our experiments show that, without adding any computational overhead or introducing any hyper-parameter (except the size of the ensemble), our method is able to consistently improve Gating approach and find a better subset of features on the two datasets with three different underlying deep CTR prediction models.
Advertising and feed ranking are essential to many Internet companies such as Facebook. Among many real-world advertising and feed ranking systems, click through rate (CTR) prediction plays a central role. In recent years, many neural network based CTR models have been proposed and achieved success such as Factorization-Machine Supported Neural Networks, DeepFM and xDeepFM. Many of them contain two commonly used components: embedding layer and MLP hidden layers. On the other side, gating mechanism is also widely applied in many research fields such as computer vision(CV) and natural language p…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Exploration-Exploitation (E{\&}E) algorithms are commonly adopted to deal with the feedback-loop issue in large-scale online recommender systems. Most of existing studies believe that high uncertainty can be a good indicator of potential reward, and thus primarily focus on the estimation of model uncertainty. We argue that such an approach overlooks the subsequent effect of exploration on model training. From the perspective of online learning, the adoption of an exploration strategy would also affect the collecting of training data, which further influences model learning. To understand the i…
LABO: LLM-Accelerated Bayesian Optimization through Broad Exploration and Selective Experimentation
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学机械工程学院）；Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学数学研究所）；School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；School of Automation, Central South University（中南大学自动化学院）；College of New Energy and Materials, China University of Petroleum, Beijing（中国石油大学（北京）新能源与材料学院）；College of Carbon Neutrality Future Technology, China University of Petroleum, Beijing（中国石油大学（北京）碳中和未来技术学院）；DeepVerse PTE. LTD.
Learning feature interactions is the key to success for the large-scale CTR prediction in Ads ranking and recommender systems. In industry, deep neural network-based models are widely adopted for modeling such problems. Researchers proposed various neural network architectures for searching and modeling the feature interactions in an end-to-end fashion. However, most methods only learn static feature interactions and have not fully leveraged deep CTR models' representation capacity. In this paper, we propose a new model: DynInt. By extending Polynomial-Interaction-Network (PIN), which learns h…
Harnessing VLM in Embodied RL: From Reward Regressor to Success Detector via Exploration-Augmented Key-Observation Gating
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所 多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学 人工智能学院）；AGIBOT
Ad creatives are one of the prominent mediums for online e-commerce advertisements. Ad creatives with enjoyable visual appearance may increase the click-through rate (CTR) of products. Ad creatives are typically handcrafted by advertisers and then delivered to the advertising platforms for advertisement. In recent years, advertising platforms are capable of instantly compositing ad creatives with arbitrarily designated elements of each ingredient, so advertisers are only required to provide basic materials. While facilitating the advertisers, a great number of potential ad creatives can be com…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；DeepMind（深度思维）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
In this paper, we study the problem of safe online learning to re-rank, where user feedback is used to improve the quality of displayed lists. Learning to rank has traditionally been studied in two settings. In the offline setting, rankers are typically learned from relevance labels created by judges. This approach has generally become standard in industrial applications of ranking, such as search. However, this approach lacks exploration and thus is limited by the information content of the offline training data. In the online setting, an algorithm can experiment with lists and learn from fee…
Existing online learning to rank (OL2R) solutions are limited to linear models, which are incompetent to capture possible non-linear relations between queries and documents. In this work, to unleash the power of representation learning in OL2R, we propose to directly learn a neural ranking model from users' implicit feedback (e.g., clicks) collected on the fly. We focus on RankNet and LambdaRank, due to their great empirical success and wide adoption in offline settings, and control the notorious explore-exploit trade-off based on the convergence analysis of neural networks using neural tangen…
The Click-though Rate (CTR) prediction task is a basic task in recommendation system. Most of the previous researches of CTR models built based on Wide \& deep structure and gradually evolved into parallel structures with different modules. However, the simple accumulation of parallel structures can lead to higher structural complexity and longer training time. Based on the Sigmoid activation function of output layer, the linear addition activation value of parallel structures in the training process is easy to make the samples fall into the weak gradient interval, resulting in the phenomenon …
Estimating click-through rate (CTR) accurately has an essential impact on improving user experience and revenue in sponsored search. For CTR prediction model, it is necessary to make out user real-time search intention. Most of the current work is to mine their intentions based on user real-time behaviors. However, it is difficult to capture the intention when user behaviors are sparse, causing the behavior sparsity problem. Moreover, it is difficult for user to jump out of their specific historical behaviors for possible interest exploration, namely weak generalization problem. We propose a n…
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 effe…
We analyze the problem of using Explore-Exploit techniques to improve precision in multi-result ranking systems such as web search, query autocompletion and news recommendation. Adopting an exploration policy directly online, without understanding its impact on the production system, may have unwanted consequences - the system may sustain large losses, create user dissatisfaction, or collect exploration data which does not help improve ranking quality. An offline framework is thus necessary to let us decide what policy and how we should apply in a production environment to ensure positive outc…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Predicting the probability that a user will click on a specific advertisement has been a prevalent issue in online advertising, attracting much research attention in the past decades. As a hot research frontier driven by industrial needs, recent years have witnessed more and more novel learning models employed to improve advertising CTR prediction. Although extant research provides necessary details on algorithmic design for addressing a variety of specific problems in advertising CTR prediction, the methodological evolution and connections between modeling frameworks are precluded. However, t…
Modern online advertising systems inevitably rely on personalization methods, such as click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Recent progress in CTR prediction enjoys the rich representation capabilities of deep learning and achieves great success in large-scale industrial applications. However, these methods can suffer from lack of exploration. Another line of prior work addresses the exploration-exploitation trade-off problem with contextual bandit methods, which are recently less studied in the industry due to the difficulty in extending their flexibility with deep models. In this paper, we pr…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Twitter（推特公司）
Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by users. This behavior is particularly harmful in personalised ads recommendations, as it can also cause new campaigns to remain unexplored. Exploration aims to address this limitation by providing new information about the environment, which encompasses user preference, and can lead to higher long-term reward. In this work, we formulate a display advertising recom…
