Khai Phan Tran

David Pardoe, Neil Daftary, Miro Furtado et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is fundamental to online advertising systems. While Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) with explicit feature interactions have long dominated this domain, recent advances in generative recommenders have shown promising results in content recommendation. However, adapting these transformer-based architectures to ads CTR prediction still presents unique challenges, including handling post-scoring contextual signals, maintaining offline-online consistency, and scaling to industrial workloads. We present CADET (Context-Conditioned Ads Decoder-Only Transformer), an end-to-end decoder-only transformer for ads CTR prediction deployed at LinkedIn. Our approach introduces several key innovations: (1) a context-conditioned decoding architecture with multi-tower prediction heads that explicitly model post-scoring signals such as ad position, resolving the chicken-and-egg problem between predicted CTR and ranking; (2) a self-gated attention mechanism that stabilizes training by adaptively regulating information flow at both representation and interaction levels; (3) a timestamp-based variant of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) that captures temporal relationships across timescales from seconds to months; (4) session masking strategies that prevent the model from learning dependencies on unavailable in-session events, addressing train-serve skew; and (5) production engineering techniques including tensor packing, sequence chunking, and custom Flash Attention kernels that enable efficient training and serving at scale. In online A/B testing, CADET achieves a 11.04\% CTR lift compared to the production LiRank baseline model, a hybrid ensemble of DCNv2 and sequential encoders. The system has been successfully deployed on LinkedIn's advertising platform, serving the main traffic for homefeed sponsored updates.

Khai Phan Tran, Xue Li

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) involves identifying relations between entities across multiple sentences in a document. Evidence sentences, crucial for precise entity pair relationships identification, enhance focus on essential text segments, improving DocRE performance. However, existing evidence retrieval systems often overlook the collaborative nature among semantically similar entity pairs in the same document, hindering the effectiveness of the evidence retrieval task. To address this, we propose a novel evidence retrieval framework, namely CDER. CDER employs an attentional graph-based architecture to capture collaborative patterns and incorporates a dynamic sub-structure for additional robustness in evidence retrieval. Experimental results on the benchmark DocRE dataset show that CDER not only excels in the evidence retrieval task but also enhances overall performance of existing DocRE system.