Online marketing is critical for many industrial platforms and business applications, aiming to increase user engagement and platform revenue by identifying corresponding delivery-sensitive groups for specific incentives, such as coupons and bonuses. As the scale and complexity of features in industrial scenarios increase, deep uplift modeling (DUM) as a promising technique has attracted increased research from academia and industry, resulting in various predictive models. However, current DUM still lacks some standardized benchmarks and unified evaluation protocols, which limit the reproducibility of experimental results in existing studies and the practical value and potential impact in this direction. In this paper, we provide an open benchmark for DUM and present comparison results of existing models in a reproducible and uniform manner. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments on two representative industrial datasets with different preprocessing settings to re-evaluate 13 existing models. Surprisingly, our experimental results show that the most recent work differs less than expected from traditional work in many cases. In addition, our experiments also reveal the limitations of DUM in generalization, especially for different preprocessing and test distributions. Our benchmarking work allows researchers to evaluate the performance of new models quickly but also reasonably demonstrates fair comparison results with existing models. It also gives practitioners valuable insights into often overlooked considerations when deploying DUM. We will make this benchmarking library, evaluation protocol, and experimental setup available on GitHub.

In real recommendation scenarios, users often have different types of behaviors, such as clicking and buying. Existing research methods show that it is possible to capture the heterogeneous interests of users through different types of behaviors. However, most multi-behavior approaches have limitations in learning the relationship between different behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based heterogeneous sequential recommendation method, namely behavior-aware multilayer perceptron (BMLP). Specifically, it has two main modules, including a heterogeneous interest perception (HIP) module, which models behaviors at multiple granularities through behavior types and transition relationships, and a purchase intent perception (PIP) module, which adaptively fuses subsequences of auxiliary behaviors to capture users' purchase intent. Compared with mainstream sequence models, MLP is competitive in terms of accuracy and has unique advantages in simplicity and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that BMLP achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms on four public datasets. In addition, its pure MLP architecture leads to a linear time complexity.

GNNs are widely used in personalized recommendation methods as they are able to capture high-order interactions between users and items in a user-item graph, enhancing user and item representations [2, 4, 15, 16, 19, 20]. However, these methods face challenges in terms of privacy laws, such as GDPR [14] as they require the collection and modeling of personal data in a central server. Constructing the global graph using all users' subgraphs is often not allowed. Therefore, existing works [12, 17] just expand a user's local graph to exploit high-order information. In this paper, we propose the first lossless federated framework named GNN4FR, which can accommodate almost all existing graph neural networks (GNNs) based recommenders. The contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: We propose a novel lossless federated framework for GNN-based methods, which enables the training process to be equivalent to the corresponding un-federated counterpart. We propose an "expanding local subgraph + synchronizing user embedding" mechanism to achieve full-graph training.

Tabular data is one of the most common data storage formats behind many real-world web applications such as retail, banking, and e-commerce. The success of these web applications largely depends on the ability of the employed machine learning model to accurately distinguish influential features from all the predetermined features in tabular data. Intuitively, in practical business scenarios, different instances should correspond to different sets of influential features, and the set of influential features of the same instance may vary in different scenarios. However, most existing methods focus on global feature selection assuming that all instances have the same set of influential features, and few methods considering instance-wise feature selection ignore the variability of influential features in different scenarios. In this paper, we first introduce a new perspective based on the influence function for instance-wise feature selection, and give some corresponding theoretical insights, the core of which is to use the influence function as an indicator to measure the importance of an instance-wise feature. We then propose a new solution for discovering instance-wise influential features in tabular data (DIWIFT), where a self-attention network is used as a feature selection model and the value of the corresponding influence function is used as an optimization objective to guide the model. Benefiting from the advantage of the influence function, i.e., its computation does not depend on a specific architecture and can also take into account the data distribution in different scenarios, our DIWIFT has better flexibility and robustness. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our DIWIFT.

Most of the Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) algorithms currently use pre-trained models as their feature extractors, which are usually trained on the ImageNet data set by using deep neural networks. The richness of the feature information embedded in the pre-trained models can help the ZSL model extract more useful features from its limited training samples. However, sometimes the difference between the training data set of the current ZSL task and the ImageNet data set is too large, which may lead to the use of pre-trained models has no obvious help or even negative impact on the performance of the ZSL model. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a biologically inspired feature enhancement framework for ZSL. Specifically, we design a dual-channel learning framework that uses auxiliary data sets to enhance the feature extractor of the ZSL model and propose a novel method to guide the selection of the auxiliary data sets based on the knowledge of biological taxonomy. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively improve the generalization ability of the ZSL model and achieve state-of-the-art results on three benchmark ZSL tasks. We also explained the experimental phenomena through the way of feature visualization.