Multi-Faceted Hierarchical Multi-Task Learning for Recommender Systems
Junning Liu, Xinjian Li, Bo An, Zijie Xia, Xu Wang · Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management · 2022
There have been many studies on improving the efficiency of shared learning in Multi-Task Learning (MTL). Previous works focused on the "micro" sharing perspective for a small number of tasks, while in Recommender Systems (RS) and many other AI applications, we often need to model a large number of tasks. For example, when using MTL to model various user behaviors in RS, if we differentiate new users and new items from old ones, the number of tasks will increase exponentially with multidimensional relations. This work proposes a Multi-Faceted Hierarchical MTL model (MFH) that exploits the multidimensional task relations in large scale MTLs with a nested hierarchical tree structure. MFH maximizes the shared learning through multi-facets of sharing and improves the performance with heterogeneous task tower design. For the first time, MFH addresses the "macro" perspective of shared learning and defines a "switcher" structure to conceptualize the structures of macro shared learning. We evaluate MFH and SOTA models in a large industry video platform of 10 billion samples and hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Results show that MFH outperforms SOTA MTL models significantly in both offline and online evaluations across all user groups, especially remarkable for new users with an online increase of 9.1% in app time per user and 1.85% in next-day retention rate. MFH currently has been deployed in WeSee, Tencent News, QQ Little World and Tencent Video, several products of Tencent. MFH is especially beneficial to the cold-start problems in RS where new users and new items often suffer from a "local overfitting" phenomenon that we first formalize in this paper.