Adaptive Domain Interest Network for Multi-domain Recommendation

TL;DR

The paper introduces an adaptive neural network model that effectively captures commonalities and differences across multiple business domains to improve recommendation quality in Alibaba's advertising system.

Contribution

It proposes the Adaptive Domain Interest network that models shared and domain-specific features, incorporating domain-specific batch normalization and a feature-level adaptation layer.

Findings

Achieved 1.8% increase in advertising revenue.

Effectively models cross-domain commonalities and diversities.

Improves topK recommendation performance across multiple scenarios.

Abstract

Industrial recommender systems usually hold data from multiple business scenarios and are expected to provide recommendation services for these scenarios simultaneously. In the retrieval step, the topK high-quality items selected from a large number of corpus usually need to be various for multiple scenarios. Take Alibaba display advertising system for example, not only because the behavior patterns of Taobao users are diverse, but also differentiated scenarios' bid prices assigned by advertisers vary significantly. Traditional methods either train models for each scenario separately, ignoring the cross-domain overlapping of user groups and items, or simply mix all samples and maintain a shared model which makes it difficult to capture significant diversities between scenarios. In this paper, we present Adaptive Domain Interest network that adaptively handles the commonalities and diversities across scenarios, making full use of multi-scenarios data during training. Then the proposed method is able to improve the performance of each business domain by giving various topK candidates for different scenarios during online inference. Specifically, our proposed ADI models the commonalities and diversities for different domains by shared networks and domain-specific networks, respectively. In addition, we apply the domain-specific batch normalization and design the domain interest adaptation layer for feature-level domain adaptation. A self training strategy is also incorporated to capture label-level connections across domains.ADI has been deployed in the display advertising system of Alibaba, and obtains 1.8% improvement on advertising revenue.