TMH: Two-Tower Multi-Head Attention neural network for CTR prediction

Abstract

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a term used to predict the probability of a user clicking on an ad or item and has become a popular research area in advertising. As the volume of Internet data increases, the labor costs of traditional feature engineering continue to rise. To reduce the dependence on feature interactions, this paper proposes a fusion model that combines explicit and implicit feature interactions, called the Two-Tower Multi-Head Attention Neural Network (TMH) approach. The model integrates multiple components such as multi-head attention, residual network, and deep neural networks into an end-to-end model that automatically obtains vector-level combinations of explicit and implicit features to predict click-through rates through higher-order explicit and implicit interactions. We evaluated the effectiveness of TMH in CTR prediction through numerous experiments using three real datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method not only outperforms existing prediction methods but also offers good interpretability.