Sheng Chen

Sishuo Chen, Zhangming Chan, Xiang-Rong Sheng et al.

Conversion rate (CVR) prediction is a core component of online advertising systems, where the attribution mechanisms-rules for allocating conversion credit across user touchpoints-fundamentally determine label generation and model optimization. While many industrial platforms support diverse attribution mechanisms (e.g., First-Click, Last-Click, Linear, and Data-Driven Multi-Touch Attribution), conventional approaches restrict model training to labels from a single production-critical attribution mechanism, discarding complementary signals in alternative attribution perspectives. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multi-Attribution Learning (MAL) framework for CVR prediction that integrates signals from multiple attribution perspectives to better capture the underlying patterns driving user conversions. Specifically, MAL is a joint learning framework consisting of two core components: the Attribution Knowledge Aggregator (AKA) and the Primary Target Predictor (PTP). AKA is implemented as a multi-task learner that integrates knowledge extracted from diverse attribution labels. PTP, in contrast, focuses on the task of generating well-calibrated conversion probabilities that align with the system-optimized attribution metric (e.g., CVR under the Last-Click attribution), ensuring direct compatibility with industrial deployment requirements. Additionally, we propose CAT, a novel training strategy that leverages the Cartesian product of all attribution label combinations to generate enriched supervision signals. This design substantially enhances the performance of the attribution knowledge aggregator. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MAL over single-attribution learning baselines, achieving +0.51% GAUC improvement on offline metrics. Online experiments demonstrate that MAL achieved a +2.6% increase in ROI (Return on Investment).

Chang Gong, Di Yao, Lei Zhang et al.

In online advertising, marketing mix modeling (MMM) is employed to predict the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of brand shops and help decision-makers to adjust the budget allocation of various advertising channels. Traditional MMM methods leveraging regression techniques can fail in handling the complexity of marketing. Although some efforts try to encode the causal structures for better prediction, they have the strict restriction that causal structures are prior-known and unchangeable. In this paper, we define a new causal MMM problem that automatically discovers the interpretable causal structures from data and yields better GMV predictions. To achieve causal MMM, two essential challenges should be addressed: (1) Causal Heterogeneity. The causal structures of different kinds of shops vary a lot. (2) Marketing Response Patterns. Various marketing response patterns i.e., carryover effect and shape effect, have been validated in practice. We argue that causal MMM needs dynamically discover specific causal structures for different shops and the predictions should comply with the prior known marketing response patterns. Thus, we propose CausalMMM that integrates Granger causality in a variational inference framework to measure the causal relationships between different channels and predict the GMV with the regularization of both temporal and saturation marketing response patterns. Extensive experiments show that CausalMMM can not only achieve superior performance of causal structure learning on synthetic datasets with improvements of 5.7%\sim 7.1%, but also enhance the GMV prediction results on a representative E-commerce platform.