Leaving No One Behind: A Multi-Scenario Multi-Task Meta Learning Approach for Advertiser Modeling

Advertisers play an essential role in many e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Amazon. Fulfilling their marketing needs and supporting their business growth is critical to the long-term prosperity of platform economies. However, compared with extensive studies on user modeling such as click-through rate predictions, much less attention has been drawn to advertisers, especially in terms of understanding their diverse demands and performance. Different from user modeling, advertiser modeling generally involves many kinds of tasks (e.g. predictions of advertisers' expenditure, active-rate, or total impressions of promoted products). In addition, major e-commerce platforms often provide multiple marketing scenarios (e.g. Sponsored Search, Display Ads, Live Streaming Ads) while advertisers' behavior tend to be dispersed among many of them. This raises the necessity of multi-task and multi-scenario consideration in comprehensive advertiser modeling, which faces the following challenges: First, one model per scenario or per task simply doesn't scale; Second, it is particularly hard to model new or minor scenarios with limited data samples; Third, inter-scenario correlations are complicated, and may vary given different tasks. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multi-scenario multitask meta learning approach (M2M) which simultaneously predicts multiple tasks in multiple advertising scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a novel meta unit that incorporates rich scenario knowledge to learn explicit inter-scenario correlations and can easily scale to new scenarios. Furthermore, we present a meta attention module to capture diverse inter-scenario correlations given different tasks, and a meta tower module to enhance the capability of capturing the representation of scenario-specific features. Compelling results from both offline evaluation and online A/B tests demonstrate the superiority of M2M over state-of-the-art methods.