2.3DCMay 9, 2020
Learning to Accelerate Heuristic Searching for Large-Scale Maximum Weighted b-Matching Problems in Online AdvertisingXiaotian Hao, Junqi Jin, Jianye Hao et al.
Bipartite b-matching is fundamental in algorithm design, and has been widely applied into economic markets, labor markets, etc. These practical problems usually exhibit two distinct features: large-scale and dynamic, which requires the matching algorithm to be repeatedly executed at regular intervals. However, existing exact and approximate algorithms usually fail in such settings due to either requiring intolerable running time or too much computation resource. To address this issue, we propose \texttt{NeuSearcher} which leverages the knowledge learned from previously instances to solve new problem instances. Specifically, we design a multichannel graph neural network to predict the threshold of the matched edges weights, by which the search region could be significantly reduced. We further propose a parallel heuristic search algorithm to iteratively improve the solution quality until convergence. Experiments on both open and industrial datasets demonstrate that \texttt{NeuSearcher} can speed up 2 to 3 times while achieving exactly the same matching solution compared with the state-of-the-art approximation approaches.
Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate PredictionGuorui Zhou, Chengru Song, Xiaoqiang Zhu et al.
Click-through rate prediction is an essential task in industrial applications, such as online advertising. Recently deep learning based models have been proposed, which follow a similar Embedding\&MLP paradigm. In these methods large scale sparse input features are first mapped into low dimensional embedding vectors, and then transformed into fixed-length vectors in a group-wise manner, finally concatenated together to fed into a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to learn the nonlinear relations among features. In this way, user features are compressed into a fixed-length representation vector, in regardless of what candidate ads are. The use of fixed-length vector will be a bottleneck, which brings difficulty for Embedding\&MLP methods to capture user's diverse interests effectively from rich historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel model: Deep Interest Network (DIN) which tackles this challenge by designing a local activation unit to adaptively learn the representation of user interests from historical behaviors with respect to a certain ad. This representation vector varies over different ads, improving the expressive ability of model greatly. Besides, we develop two techniques: mini-batch aware regularization and data adaptive activation function which can help training industrial deep networks with hundreds of millions of parameters. Experiments on two public datasets as well as an Alibaba real production dataset with over 2 billion samples demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches, which achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. DIN now has been successfully deployed in the online display advertising system in Alibaba, serving the main traffic.