An Incremental Learning framework for Large-scale CTR Prediction
arXiv:2209.00458 · doi:10.1145/3523227.3547390
Abstract
In this work we introduce an incremental learning framework for Click-Through-Rate (CTR) prediction and demonstrate its effectiveness for Taboola's massive-scale recommendation service. Our approach enables rapid capture of emerging trends through warm-starting from previously deployed models and fine tuning on "fresh" data only. Past knowledge is maintained via a teacher-student paradigm, where the teacher acts as a distillation technique, mitigating the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. Our incremental learning framework enables significantly faster training and deployment cycles (x12 speedup). We demonstrate a consistent Revenue Per Mille (RPM) lift over multiple traffic segments and a significant CTR increase on newly introduced items.
To be published in the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 22), Seattle, WA, USA