Mixture of Virtual-Kernel Experts for Multi-Objective User Profile Modeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces MVKE, a multi-task deep learning model with virtual-kernel experts and a gating mechanism, to better capture diverse user preferences across actions and topics, enhancing personalization in advertising.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel MVKE model that models user preferences on multiple actions and topics simultaneously using virtual-kernel experts and a gate-based fusion structure.

Findings

Significant online and offline performance improvements in Tencent Advertising System.

Enhanced user preference representation across multiple actions and topics.

Noticeable revenue lift in practical advertising deployment.

Abstract

In industrial applications like online advertising and recommendation systems, diverse and accurate user profiles can greatly help improve personalization. Deep learning is widely applied to mine expressive tags to users from their historical interactions in the system, e.g., click, conversion action in the advertising chain. The usual approach is to take a certain action as the objective, and introduce multiple independent Two-Tower models to predict the possibility of users' action on tags (known as CTR or CVR prediction). The predicted users' high probably attractive tags are to represent their preferences. However, the single-action models cannot learn complementarily and support effective training on data-sparse actions. Besides, limited by the lack of information fusion between the two towers, the model learns insufficiently to represent users' preferences on various tag \textbf{topics} well. This paper introduces a novel multi-task model called Mixture of Virtual-Kernel Experts (MVKE) to learn user preferences on various actions and topics unitedly. In MVKE, we propose a concept of Virtual-Kernel Expert, which focuses on modeling one particular facet of the user's preferences, and all of them learn coordinately. Besides, the gate-based structure used in MVKE builds an information fusion bridge between two towers, improving the model's capability and maintaining high efficiency. We apply the model in Tencent Advertising System, where both online and offline evaluations show that our method has a significant improvement compared with the existing ones and brings about an obvious lift to actual advertising revenue.