Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
research-article

Learning to Retrieve User Behaviors for Click-through Rate Estimation

Published: 08 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Click-through rate (CTR) estimation plays a crucial role in modern online personalization services. It is essential to capture users’ drifting interests by modeling sequential user behaviors to build an accurate CTR estimation model. However, as the users accumulate a large amount of behavioral data on the online platforms, the current CTR models have to truncate user behavior sequences and utilize the most recent behaviors, which leads to a problem that sequential patterns such as periodicity or long-term dependency are not contained in the recent behaviors but in far back history. However, it is non-trivial to model the entire user sequence by directly using it for two reasons. Firstly, the very long input sequences will make online inference time and system load infeasible. Secondly, the very long sequences contain much noise, thus making it difficult for CTR models to capture useful patterns effectively. To tackle this issue, we consider it from the input data perspective instead of designing more sophisticated yet complex models. As the entire user behavior sequence contains much noise, it is unnecessary to input the entire sequence. Instead, we could just retrieve only a small part of it as the input to the CTR model. In this article, we propose the User Behavior Retrieval (UBR) framework which aims at learning to retrieve the most informative user behaviors according to each CTR estimation request. Retrieving only a small set of behaviors could alleviate the two problems of utilizing very long sequences (i.e., inference efficiency and noisy input). The distinguishing property of UBR is that it supports arbitrary and learnable retrieval functions instead of utilizing a fixed pre-defined function, which is different from the current retrieval-based methods. Offline evaluations on three large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and efficacy of the UBR framework. We further deploy UBR at the Huawei App Store, where it achieves 6.6% of eCPM gain in the online A/B test and now serves the main traffic in the Huawei App Store advertising scenario.

References

[1]
Alex Beutel, Paul Covington, Sagar Jain, Can Xu, Jia Li, Vince Gatto, and Ed H. Chi. 2018. Latent cross: Making use of context in recurrent recommender systems. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[2]
Moses S. Charikar. 2002. Similarity estimation techniques from rounding algorithms. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. 380–388.
[3]
Qiwei Chen, Changhua Pei, Shanshan Lv, Chao Li, Junfeng Ge, and Wenwu Ou. 2021. End-to-end user behavior retrieval in click-through RatePrediction model. CoRR abs/2108.04468 (2021).
[4]
Qiwei Chen, Huan Zhao, Wei Li, Pipei Huang, and Wenwu Ou. 2019. Behavior sequence transformer for e-commerce recommendation in alibaba. In Proceedings of the 1st DLP-KDD Workshop. 1–4.
[5]
Tong Chen, Hongzhi Yin, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Wen-Chih Peng, Xue Li, and Xiaofang Zhou. 2020. Sequence-aware factorization machines for temporal predictive analytics. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering. IEEE, 1405–1416.
[6]
Xu Chen, Hongteng Xu, Yongfeng Zhang, Jiaxi Tang, Yixin Cao, Zheng Qin, and Hongyuan Zha. 2018. Sequential recommendation with user memory networks. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[7]
Heng-Tze Cheng, Levent Koc, Jeremiah Harmsen, Tal Shaked, Tushar Chandra, Hrishi Aradhye, Glen Anderson, Greg Corrado, Wei Chai, Mustafa Ispir, Rohan Anil, Zakaria Haque, Lichan Hong, Vihan Jain, Xiaobing Liu, and Hemal Shah. 2016. Wide and deep learning for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the DLRS@RecSys, ACM, 7–10.
[8]
Krzysztof Choromanski, Valerii Likhosherstov, David Dohan, Xingyou Song, Andreea Gane, Tamas Sarlos, Peter Hawkins, Jared Davis, Afroz Mohiuddin, Lukasz Kaiser, David Belanger, Lucy Colwell, and Adrian Weller. 2020. Rethinking attention with performers. In Proceeding of the ICLR.
[9]
Travis Ebesu, Bin Shen, and Yi Fang. 2018. Collaborative memory network for recommendation systems. In Proceedings of the SIGIR.
[10]
Yufei Feng, Fuyu Lv, Weichen Shen, Menghan Wang, Fei Sun, Yu Zhu, and Keping Yang. 2019. Deep session interest network for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the IJCAI.
[11]
Alex Graves, Greg Wayne, and Ivo Danihelka. 2014. Neural turing machines. CoRR abs/1410.5401 (2014).
[12]
Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Yunming Ye, Zhenguo Li, and Xiuqiang He. 2017. DeepFM: A factorization-machine based neural network for CTR prediction. In Proceeding of the IJCAI. 1725–1731
[13]
Ruining He, Chen Fang, Zhaowen Wang, and Julian McAuley. 2016. Vista: A visually, socially, and temporally-aware model for artistic recommendation. In Proceedings of the RecSys.
[14]
Ruining He and Julian McAuley. 2016. Fusing similarity models with markov chains for sparse sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the ICDM.
[15]
Balázs Hidasi and Alexandros Karatzoglou. 2018. Recurrent neural networks with top-k gains for session-based recommendations. In Proceedings of the CIKM.
[16]
Balázs Hidasi, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Linas Baltrunas, and Domonkos Tikk. 2016. Session-based recommendations with recurrent neural networks. ICLR.
[17]
Tongwen Huang, Zhiqi Zhang, and Junlin Zhang. 2019. FiBiNET: Combining feature importance and bilinear feature interaction for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 169–177.
[18]
Jiarui Jin, Xianyu Chen, Weinan Zhang, Junjie Huang, Ziming Feng, and Yong Yu. 2022. Learn over past, evolve for future: Search-based time-aware recommendation with sequential behavior data. In Proceeding of the WWW, ACM, 2451–2461.
[19]
How Jing and Alexander J. Smola. 2017. Neural survival recommender. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[20]
Yuchin Juan, Yong Zhuang, Wei-Sheng Chin, and Chih-Jen Lin. 2016. Field-aware factorization machines for CTR prediction. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 43–50.
[21]
Wang-Cheng Kang and Julian McAuley. 2018. Self-attentive sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the ICDM.
[22]
Angelos Katharopoulos, Apoorv Vyas, Nikolaos Pappas, and François Fleuret. 2020. Transformers are rnns: Fast autoregressive transformers with linear attention. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 5156–5165.
[23]
Nikita Kitaev, Łukasz Kaiser, and Anselm Levskaya. 2020. Reformer: The Efficient Transformer. In Proceeding of the ICLR.
[24]
Yehuda Koren. 2009. Collaborative filtering with temporal dynamics. In Proceedings of the KDD.
[25]
Jiacheng Li, Yujie Wang, and Julian McAuley. 2020. Time interval aware self-attention for sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[26]
Zekun Li, Zeyu Cui, Shu Wu, Xiaoyu Zhang, and Liang Wang. 2019. Fi-gnn: Modeling feature interactions via graph neural networks for ctr prediction. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 539–548.
[27]
Jianxun Lian, Xiaohuan Zhou, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongxia Chen, Xing Xie, and Guangzhong Sun. 2018. xdeepfm: Combining explicit and implicit feature interactions for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 1754–1763.
[28]
Bin Liu, Ruiming Tang, Yingzhi Chen, Jinkai Yu, Huifeng Guo, and Yuzhou Zhang. 2019. Feature generation by convolutional neural network for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference. 1119–1129.
[29]
Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Diyi Wang, Zhaokang Li, and Liang Wang. 2016. Context-aware sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the ICDM.
[30]
Rajiv Pasricha and Julian McAuley. 2018. Translation-based factorization machines for sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 63–71.
[31]
Qi Pi, Weijie Bian, Guorui Zhou, Xiaoqiang Zhu, and Kun Gai. 2019. Practice on long sequential user behavior modeling for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the SIGKDD.
[32]
Pi Qi, Xiaoqiang Zhu, Guorui Zhou, Yujing Zhang, Zhe Wang, Lejian Ren, Ying Fan, and Kun Gai. 2020. Search-based user interest modeling with lifelong sequential behavior data for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
[33]
Jiarui Qin, Kan Ren, Yuchen Fang, Weinan Zhang, and Yong Yu. 2020. Sequential recommendation with dual side neighbor-based collaborative relation modeling. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. ACM.
[34]
Jiarui Qin, Weinan Zhang, Rong Su, Zhirong Liu, Weiwen Liu, Ruiming Tang, Xiuqiang He, and Yong Yu. 2021. Retrieval and interaction machine for tabular data prediction. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 1379–1389.
[35]
Jiarui Qin, W. Zhang, Xin Wu, Jiarui Jin, Yuchen Fang, and Y. Yu. 2020. User behavior retrieval for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.
[36]
Yanru Qu, Han Cai, Kan Ren, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu, Ying Wen, and Jun Wang. 2016. Product-based neural networks for user response prediction. In Proceedings of the ICDM.
[37]
Yanru Qu, Bohui Fang, Weinan Zhang, Ruiming Tang, Minzhe Niu, Huifeng Guo, Yong Yu, and Xiuqiang He. 2018. Product-based neural networks for user response prediction over multi-field categorical data. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 37, 1 (2018), 1–35.
[38]
Kan Ren, Jiarui Qin, Yuchen Fang, Weinan Zhang, Lei Zheng, Weijie Bian, Guorui Zhou, Jian Xu, Yong Yu, Xiaoqiang Zhu, and Kun Gai. 2019. Lifelong sequential modeling with personalized memorization for user response prediction. In Proceeding of the SIGIR, ACM, 565–574.
[39]
Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jing Li, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, and Maarten de Rijke. 2019. RepeatNet: A repeat aware neural recommendation machine for session-based recommendation. In Proceeding of the AAAI. AAAI Press, 4806–4813.
[40]
Steffen Rendle. 2010. Factorization machines. In Proceedings of the ICDM.
[41]
Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, Zeno Gantner, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2009. BPR: Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback. In UAI. AUAI Press, 452–461.
[42]
Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2010. Factorizing personalized markov chains for next-basket recommendation. In Proceedings of the WWW.
[43]
Stephen E. Robertson, Steve Walker, Susan Jones, Micheline M. Hancock-Beaulieu, and Mike Gatford. 1995. Okapi at TREC-3. Nist Special Publication Sp 109, 109 (1995).
[44]
Fei Sun, Jun Liu, Jian Wu, Changhua Pei, Xiao Lin, Wenwu Ou, and Peng Jiang. 2019. BERT4Rec: Sequential recommendation with bidirectional encoder representations from transformer. In Proceedings of the CIKM. 1441–1450.
[45]
Anh-Phuong Ta. 2015. Factorization machines with follow-the-regularized-leader for CTR prediction in display advertising. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data. IEEE.
[46]
Jiaxi Tang and Ke Wang. 2018. Personalized top-n sequential recommendation via convolutional sequence embedding. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[47]
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Dara Bahri, and Donald Metzler. 2022. Efficient transformers: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys 55, 6 (2022), 1–28.
[48]
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. Attention is all you need. In Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
[49]
Kiewan Villatel, Elena Smirnova, Jérémie Mary, and Philippe Preux. 2018. Recurrent neural networks for long and short-term sequential recommendation. CoRR abs/1807.09142 (2018).
[50]
Qinyong Wang, Hongzhi Yin, Zhiting Hu, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, and Zi Huang. 2018. Neural memory streaming recommender networks with adversarial training. In Proceedings of the KDD.
[51]
Ruoxi Wang, Bin Fu, Gang Fu, and Mingliang Wang. 2017. Deep and cross network for ad click predictions. In Proceedings of the ADKDD’17. 1–7.
[52]
Xuanhui Wang, Cheng Li, Nadav Golbandi, Michael Bendersky, and Marc Najork. 2018. The lambdaloss framework for ranking metric optimization. In Proceedings of the CIKM.
[53]
Gerhard Widmer and Miroslav Kubat. 1996. Learning in the presence of concept drift and hidden contexts. Machine Learning 23, 1 (1996), 69–101.
[54]
Ronald J. Williams. 1992. Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning. Machine learning 8, 3 (1992), 229–256.
[55]
Chao-Yuan Wu, Amr Ahmed, Alex Beutel, Alexander J. Smola, and How Jing. 2017. Recurrent recommender networks. In Proceedings of the WSDM.
[56]
Qitian Wu, Yirui Gao, Xiaofeng Gao, Paul Weng, and Guihai Chen. 2019. Dual sequential prediction models linking sequential recommendation and information dissemination. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 447–457.
[57]
Shu Wu, Yuyuan Tang, Yanqiao Zhu, Liang Wang, Xing Xie, and Tieniu Tan. 2019. Session-based recommendation with graph neural networks. In Proceedings of the AAAI.
[58]
Yongji Wu, Defu Lian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lu Yin, Mingyang Yin, Jingren Zhou, and Hongxia Yang. 2021. Linear-time self attention with codeword histogram for efficient recommendation. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021. 1262–1273.
[59]
Dongbo Xi, Fuzhen Zhuang, Bowen Song, Yongchun Zhu, Shuai Chen, Dan Hong, Tao Chen, Xi Gu, and Qing He. 2020. Neural hierarchical factorization machines for user’s event sequence analysis. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 1893–1896.
[60]
Jun Xiao, Hao Ye, Xiangnan He, Hanwang Zhang, Fei Wu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2017. Attentional factorization machines: Learning the weight of feature interactions via attention networks. In Proceeding of the IJCAI. ijcai.org, 3119–3125.
[61]
Chengfeng Xu, Pengpeng Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Victor S. Sheng, Jiajie Xu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Junhua Fang, and Xiaofang Zhou. 2019. Graph contextualized self-attention network for session-based recommendation. In Proceedings of the IJCAI.
[62]
Jiajun Zhang, Yang Zhao, Haoran Li, and Chengqing Zong. 2018. Attention with sparsity regularization for neural machine translation and summarization. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 27, 3 (2018), 507–518.
[63]
Weinan Zhang, Tianming Du, and Jun Wang. 2016. Deep learning over multi-field categorical data: A case study on user response prediction. In Proceedings of the ECIR.
[64]
Weinan Zhang, Jiarui Qin, Wei Guo, Ruiming Tang, and Xiuqiang He. 2021. Deep learning for click-through rate estimation. In Proceedings of the IJCAI.
[65]
Guorui Zhou, Na Mou, Ying Fan, Qi Pi, Weijie Bian, Chang Zhou, Xiaoqiang Zhu, and Kun Gai. 2019. Deep interest evolution network for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the AAAI.
[66]
Guorui Zhou, Xiaoqiang Zhu, Chenru Song, Ying Fan, Han Zhu, Xiao Ma, Yanghui Yan, Junqi Jin, Han Li, and Kun Gai. 2018. Deep interest network for click-through rate prediction. In Proceedings of the KDD.
[67]
Han Zhu, Xiang Li, Pengye Zhang, Guozheng Li, Jie He, Han Li, and Kun Gai. 2018. Learning tree-based deep model for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the KDD.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Adapting Constrained Markov Decision Process for OCPC Bidding with Delayed ConversionsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/370642043:2(1-29)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2025
  • (2024)MLoRA: Multi-Domain Low-Rank Adaptive Network for CTR PredictionProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3640457.3688134(287-297)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2024)TWIN V2: Scaling Ultra-Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Enhanced CTR Prediction at KuaishouProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680030(4890-4897)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Learning to Retrieve User Behaviors for Click-through Rate Estimation

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 41, Issue 4
    October 2023
    958 pages
    ISSN:1046-8188
    EISSN:1558-2868
    DOI:10.1145/3587261
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 08 April 2023
    Online AM: 09 January 2023
    Accepted: 09 December 2022
    Revised: 30 August 2022
    Received: 08 April 2022
    Published in TOIS Volume 41, Issue 4

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. CTR estimation
    2. information retrieval
    3. sequential user behavior modeling

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)429
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)46
    Reflects downloads up to 31 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Adapting Constrained Markov Decision Process for OCPC Bidding with Delayed ConversionsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/370642043:2(1-29)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2025
    • (2024)MLoRA: Multi-Domain Low-Rank Adaptive Network for CTR PredictionProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3640457.3688134(287-297)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
    • (2024)TWIN V2: Scaling Ultra-Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Enhanced CTR Prediction at KuaishouProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680030(4890-4897)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Missing Interest Modeling with Lifelong User Behavior Data for Retrieval RecommendationProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680019(4390-4396)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
    • (2024)De-Anchor: Mitigating Attention Polarization for Lifelong User Behavior Modeling in Click-Through Rate PredictionCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651486(694-697)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Optimizing Click-Through Rate Prediction: A Model Utilizing Multi-Attention Fusion Hashing Algorithms2024 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)10.1109/SMC54092.2024.10831112(3042-3049)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Data-driven smoothing approaches for interest modeling in recommendation systemsExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123524249(123524)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2024)Deep click interest network for reranking hotelsEngineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence10.1016/j.engappai.2023.107675130:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Search Result Diversification Using Query Aspects as BottlenecksProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615050(3040-3051)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Full Text

    View this article in Full Text.

    Full Text

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media