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MaskNet: Introducing Feature-Wise Multiplication to CTR Ranking Models by Instance-Guided Mask

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arxiv 2102.07619 v2 pith:Q57WZY2E submitted 2021-02-09 cs.IR

classification cs.IR
keywords modelsrankingfeaturefeed-forwardmaskblockmasknetbasicbuilding
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Click-Through Rate(CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features. Shallow feed-forward network is widely used in many state-of-the-art DNN models such as FNN, DeepFM and xDeepFM to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. However, some research has proved that addictive feature interaction, particular feed-forward neural networks, is inefficient in capturing common feature interaction. To resolve this problem, we introduce specific multiplicative operation into DNN ranking system by proposing instance-guided mask which performs element-wise product both on the feature embedding and feed-forward layers guided by input instance. We also turn the feed-forward layer in DNN model into a mixture of addictive and multiplicative feature interactions by proposing MaskBlock in this paper. MaskBlock combines the layer normalization, instance-guided mask, and feed-forward layer and it is a basic building block to be used to design new ranking model under various configurations. The model consisting of MaskBlock is called MaskNet in this paper and two new MaskNet models are proposed to show the effectiveness of MaskBlock as basic building block for composing high performance ranking systems. The experiment results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed MaskNet models outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly, which implies MaskBlock is an effective basic building unit for composing new high performance ranking systems.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. SpecFormer: Mitigating Embedding and Attention Collapse via Spectral-Aware Transformer for Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SpecFormer is a spectral-aware Transformer that flattens the singular-value spectrum of embeddings to prevent embedding/attention collapse, outperforming baselines on CTR benchmarks and scaling with layer depth.

  2. Revisiting Feature Interactions from the Perspective of Quadratic Neural Networks for Click-through Rate Prediction

    cs.IR 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Hadamard product feature interactions work because they make CTR models quadratic networks, and the proposed QNN-alpha with multi-head Khatri-Rao product and self-ensemble loss achieves state-of-the-art results on six...

  3. RAMP: Robust Ad Recommendation Under Limited Personalized-Feature Availability via Masking and Alignment Pathways

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    RAMP splits ad prediction into personalized and non-personalized towers, then uses a distillation-style loss to transfer knowledge so non-personalized predictions stay accurate when user features are absent.

  4. Synergizing Implicit and Explicit User Interests: A Multi-Embedding Retrieval Framework at Pinterest

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A production recommender framework combines a differentiable clustering module for implicit interests and conditional retrieval for explicit followed topics, deployed at Pinterest home feed.

  5. Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Breaker improves single-slot recommendation by clustering users into groups, which makes the model work harder on user-side features and focus more on user-item preferences.

  6. Decoupled Entity Representation Learning for Pinterest Ads Ranking

    cs.IR 2025-09 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Pre-computed user and Pin embeddings from multi-tower models improve Pinterest ad ranking by small but statistically significant margins.

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