One Model to Serve All: Star Topology Adaptive Recommender for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction

Abstract

Traditional industry recommendation systems usually use data in a single domain to train models and then serve the domain. However, a large-scale commercial platform often contains multiple domains, and its recommendation system often needs to make click-through rate (CTR) predictions for multiple domains. Generally, different domains may share some common user groups and items, and each domain may have its own unique user groups and items. Moreover, even the same user may have different behaviors in different domains. In order to leverage all the data from different domains, a single model can be trained to serve all domains. However, it is difficult for a single model to capture the characteristics of various domains and serve all domains well. On the other hand, training an individual model for each domain separately does not fully use the data from all domains. In this paper, we propose the Star Topology Adaptive Recommender (STAR) model to train a single model to serve all domains by leveraging data from all domains simultaneously, capturing the characteristics of each domain, and modeling the commonalities between different domains. Essentially, the net- work of each domain consists of two factorized networks: one centered network shared by all domains and the domain-specific network tailored for each domain. For each domain, we combine these two factorized networks and generate a unified network by element-wise multiplying the weights of the shared network and those of the domain-specific network, although these two factorized networks can be combined using other functions, which is open for further research. Most importantly, STAR can learn the shared network from all the data and adapt domain-specific parameters according to the characteristics of each domain. The experimental results from production data validate the superiority of the proposed STAR model. Since late 2020, STAR has been deployed in the display advertising system of Alibaba, obtaining 8.0% improvement on CTR and 6.0% increase on RPM (Revenue Per Mille).