GAIN: A Gated Adaptive Feature Interaction Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

CTR (Click-Through Rate) prediction has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry for its significant contribution to revenue. In the last decade, learning feature interactions have become a mainstream research direction, and dozens of feature interaction-based models have been proposed for the CTR prediction task. The most common approach for existing models is to enumerate all possible feature interactions or to learn higher-order feature interactions by designing complex models. However, a simple enumeration will introduce meaningless and harmful interactions, and a complex model structure will bring a higher complexity. In this work, we propose a lightweight, yet effective model called the Gated Adaptive feature Interaction Network (GAIN). We devise a novel cross module to drop meaningless feature interactions and preserve informative ones. Our cross module consists of multiple gated units, each of which can independently learn an arbitrary-order feature interaction. We combine the cross module with a deep module into GAIN and conduct comparative experiments with state-of-the-art models on two public datasets to verify its validity. Our experimental results show that GAIN can achieve a comparable or even better performance compared to its competitors. Furthermore, in order to verify the effectiveness of the feature interactions learned by GAIN, we transfer learned interactions to other models, such as Logistic Regression (LR) and Factorization Machines (FM), and find out that their performance can be significantly improved.