Disentangled self-attention neural network based on information sharing for click-through rate prediction

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Jan 2:10:e1764. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1764. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

With the exponential growth of network resources, recommendation systems have become successful at combating information overload. In intelligent recommendation systems, the prediction of click-through rates (CTR) plays a crucial role. Most CTR models employ a parallel network architecture to successfully capture explicit and implicit feature interactions. However, the existing models ignore two aspects. One limitation observed in most models is that they focus only on the interaction of paired term features, with no emphasis on modeling unary terms. The second issue is that most models input characteristics indiscriminately into parallel networks, resulting in network input oversharing. We propose a disentangled self-attention neural network based on information sharing (DSAN) for CTR prediction to simulate complex feature interactions. Firstly, an embedding layer transforms high-dimensional sparse features into low-dimensional dense matrices. Then, the disentangled multi-head self-attention learns the relationship between different features and is fed into a parallel network architecture. Finally, we set up a shared interaction layer to solve the problem of insufficient information sharing in parallel networks. Results from experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses existing methods in predictive accuracy.

Keywords: Click-through rate prediction; Disentangled muti-head self-attention; Feature interactions; Parallel network; Recommendation systems.

Grants and funding

The research received funding from the Key Research and Promotion Projects of Henan Province under Grant Agreement No (222102210034, 222102210178, 222102210229 and 232102210031), and the Key Research Projects of Henan Higher Education Institutions under Grant Agreement No 22A520020. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.