Rec4Ad: A Free Lunch to Mitigate Sample Selection Bias for Ads CTR
  Prediction in Taobao
Jingyue Gao Shuguang Han Han Zhu Siran Yang Yuning Jiang Jian Xu Bo Zheng
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction serves as a fundamental component in
online advertising. A common practice is to train a CTR model on advertisement
(ad) impressions with user feedback. Since ad impressions are purposely
selected by the model itself, their distribution differs from the inference
distribution and thus exhibits sample selection bias (SSB) that affects model
performance. Existing studies on SSB mainly employ sample re-weighting
techniques which suffer from high variance and poor model calibration. Another
line of work relies on costly uniform data that is inadequate to train
industrial models. Thus mitigating SSB in industrial models with a
uniform-data-free framework is worth exploring. Fortunately, many platforms
display mixed results of organic items (i.e., recommendations) and sponsored
items (i.e., ads) to users, where impressions of ads and recommendations are
selected by different systems but share the same user decision rationales.
Based on the above characteristics, we propose to leverage recommendations
samples as a free lunch to mitigate SSB for ads CTR model (Rec4Ad). After
elaborating data augmentation, Rec4Ad learns disentangled representations with
alignment and decorrelation modules for enhancement. When deployed in Taobao
display advertising system, Rec4Ad achieves substantial gains in key business
metrics, with a lift of up to +6.6\% CTR and +2.9\% RPM.