MaskFusion: Feature Augmentation for Click-Through Rate Prediction via Input-adaptive Mask Fusion

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays important role in the advertisement, recommendation, and retrieval applications. Given the feature set, how to fully utilize the information from the feature set is an active topic in deep CTR model designs. There are several existing deep CTR works focusing on feature interactions, feature attentions, and so on. They attempt to capture high-order feature interactions to enhance the generalization ability of deep CTR models. However, these works either suffer from poor high-order feature interaction modeling using DNN or ignore the balance between generalization and memorization during the recommendation. To mitigate these problems, we propose an adaptive feature fusion framework called MaskFusion, to additionally capture the explicit interactions between the input feature and the existing deep part structure of deep CTR models dynamically, besides the common feature interactions proposed in existing works. MaskFusion is an instance-aware feature augmentation method, which makes deep CTR models more personalized by assigning each feature with an instance-adaptive mask and fusing each feature with each hidden state vector in the deep part structure. MaskFusion can also be integrated into any existing deep CTR models flexibly. MaskFusion achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on all seven benchmarks deep CTR models with three public datasets.