EENet: An Efficient and Effective Network for Large-Scale CTR Prediction

Efficient and effective modeling of feature interactions is key to large-scale Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction. Although existing feature interaction methods have improved the model accuracy, their computational consumption still increase exponentially with the number of feature fields and become severe efficiency bottleneck in real-world industrial scenarios. To address the issues, we propose an E fficient and E ffective NET work for large-scale CTR prediction named EENet . EENet presents a new alternating stacking architecture of implicit and explicit interaction layers, and each implicit layer in EENet can reduce both local computational and parameter load remarkably. EENet also designs a unified explicit interaction operation which can only use simple matrix multiplication to capture field-wise patterns. Moreover, the order of multiplications in EENet is rearranged to further decrease the computational complexity from quadratic to linear with respect to the number of feature fields. EENet thus can support the high efficiency in real-practice industrial scenarios with hundreds of feature fields. A set of extensive experiments is performed on two public datasets and one industrial dataset for effectiveness evaluation, and five larger-scale synthetic datasets for efficiency evaluation. The results highlight that our EENet can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art models in terms of both efficiency and scalability, while also maintaining superior effectiveness. Compared with DCNv2 and FiBiNet, EENet achieves 8.06 \(\times\) and 36.72 \(\times\) efficiency improvements in training, and 2.02 \(\times\) and 48.88 \(\times\) improvements in inference, respectively. Our solution and source code are available at https://github.com/Yeedzhi/EENet .