ML-DCN: Masked Low-Rank Deep Crossing Network Towards Scalable Ads Click-through Rate Prediction at Pinterest
This work addresses the problem of scalable and compute-efficient ad click-through rate prediction for large-scale platforms like Pinterest, representing an incremental improvement by combining existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of scaling feature interaction modules in deep learning recommendation systems under fixed serving budgets, proposing ML-DCN which integrates an instance-conditioned mask into a low-rank crossing layer to achieve state-of-the-art performance, with experiments showing higher AUC than DCNv2 and MaskNet at matched FLOPs and online A/B tests demonstrating statistically significant improvements in ads metrics like CTR.
Deep learning recommendation systems rely on feature interaction modules to model complex user-item relationships across sparse categorical and dense features. In large-scale ad ranking, increasing model capacity is a promising path to improving both predictive performance and business outcomes, yet production serving budgets impose strict constraints on latency and FLOPs. This creates a central tension: we want interaction modules that both scale effectively with additional compute and remain compute-efficient at serving time. In this work, we study how to scale feature interaction modules under a fixed serving budget. We find that naively scaling DCNv2 and MaskNet, despite their widespread adoption in industry, yields rapidly diminishing offline gains in the Pinterest ads ranking system. To overcome aforementioned limitations, we propose ML-DCN, an interaction module that integrates an instance-conditioned mask into a low-rank crossing layer, enabling per-example selection and amplification of salient interaction directions while maintaining efficient computation. This novel architecture combines the strengths of DCNv2 and MaskNet, scales efficiently with increased compute, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Experiments on a large internal Pinterest ads dataset show that ML-DCN achieves higher AUC than DCNv2, MaskNet, and recent scaling-oriented alternatives at matched FLOPs, and it scales more favorably overall as compute increases, exhibiting a stronger AUC-FLOPs trade-off. Finally, online A/B tests demonstrate statistically significant improvements in key ads metrics (including CTR and click-quality measures) and ML-DCN has been deployed in the production system with neutral serving cost.