FinalMLP: An Enhanced Two-Stream MLP Model for CTR Prediction

Abstract

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks in online advertising and recommendation. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) serves as a core component in many deep CTR prediction models, but it has been widely shown that applying a vanilla MLP network alone is ineffective in learning complex feature interactions. As such, many two-stream models (e.g., Wide&Deep, DeepFM, and DCN) have recently been proposed, aiming to integrate two parallel sub-networks to learn feature interactions from two different views for enhanced CTR prediction. In addition to one MLP stream that learns feature interactions implicitly, most of the existing research focuses on designing another stream to complement the MLP stream with explicitly enhanced feature interactions. Instead, this paper presents a simple two-stream feature interaction model, namely FinalMLP, which employs only MLPs in both streams yet achieves surprisingly strong performance. In contrast to sophisticated network design in each stream, our work enhances CTR modeling through a feature selection module, which produces differentiated feature inputs to two streams, and a group-wise bilinear fusion module, which effectively captures stream-level interactions across two streams. We show that FinalMLP achieves competitive or even better performance against many existing two-stream CTR models on four open benchmark datasets and also brings significant CTR improvements during an online A/B test in our industrial news recommender system. We envision that the simple yet effective FinalMLP model could serve as a new strong baseline for future development of two-stream CTR models. Our source code will be available at MindSpore/models and FuxiCTR/model_zoo.