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Main Authors: Xu, Han, Pan, Taoxing, Liu, Zhiqiang, Xu, Xiaoxiao, Hu, Lantao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15098
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author Xu, Han
Pan, Taoxing
Liu, Zhiqiang
Xu, Xiaoxiao
Hu, Lantao
author_facet Xu, Han
Pan, Taoxing
Liu, Zhiqiang
Xu, Xiaoxiao
Hu, Lantao
contents User behavior modeling -- which aims to extract user interests from behavioral data -- has shown great power in Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, a key component in recommendation systems. Recently, attention-based algorithms have become a promising direction, as attention mechanisms emphasize the relevant interactions from rich behaviors. However, the methods struggle to capture the preferences of tail users with sparse interaction histories. To address the problem, we propose a novel variational inference approach, namely Group Prior Sampler Variational Inference (GPSVI), which introduces group preferences as priors to refine latent user interests for tail users. In GPSVI, the extent of adjustments depends on the estimated uncertainty of individual preference modeling. In addition, We further enhance the expressive power of variational inference by a volume-preserving flow. An appealing property of the GPSVI method is its ability to revert to traditional attention for head users with rich behavioral data while consistently enhancing performance for long-tail users with sparse behaviors. Rigorous analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that GPSVI consistently improves the performance of tail users. Moreover, online A/B testing on a large-scale real-world recommender system further confirms the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15098
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incorporating Group Prior into Variational Inference for Tail-User Behavior Modeling in CTR Prediction
Xu, Han
Pan, Taoxing
Liu, Zhiqiang
Xu, Xiaoxiao
Hu, Lantao
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
User behavior modeling -- which aims to extract user interests from behavioral data -- has shown great power in Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, a key component in recommendation systems. Recently, attention-based algorithms have become a promising direction, as attention mechanisms emphasize the relevant interactions from rich behaviors. However, the methods struggle to capture the preferences of tail users with sparse interaction histories. To address the problem, we propose a novel variational inference approach, namely Group Prior Sampler Variational Inference (GPSVI), which introduces group preferences as priors to refine latent user interests for tail users. In GPSVI, the extent of adjustments depends on the estimated uncertainty of individual preference modeling. In addition, We further enhance the expressive power of variational inference by a volume-preserving flow. An appealing property of the GPSVI method is its ability to revert to traditional attention for head users with rich behavioral data while consistently enhancing performance for long-tail users with sparse behaviors. Rigorous analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that GPSVI consistently improves the performance of tail users. Moreover, online A/B testing on a large-scale real-world recommender system further confirms the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
title Incorporating Group Prior into Variational Inference for Tail-User Behavior Modeling in CTR Prediction
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15098