Learning to Expand Audience via Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics for Recommendation and Advertising

Abstract: In recommender systems and advertising platforms, marketers always want to deliver products, contents, or advertisements to potential audiences over media channels such as display, video, or social. Given a set of audiences or customers (seed users), the audience expansion technique (look-alike modeling) is a promising solution to identify more potential audiences, who are similar to the seed users and likely to finish the business goal of the target campaign. However, look-alike modeling faces two challenges: (1) In practice, a company could run hundreds of marketing campaigns to promote various contents within completely different categories every day, e.g., sports, politics, society. Thus, it is difficult to utilize a common method to expand audiences for all campaigns. (2) The seed set of a certain campaign could only cover limited users. Therefore, a customized approach based on such a seed set is likely to be overfitting. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework named Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics (MetaHeac) which has been deployed in WeChat Look-alike System. In the offline stage, a general model which can capture the relationships among various tasks is trained from a meta-learning perspective on all existing campaign tasks. In the online stage, for a new campaign, a customized model is learned with the given seed set based on the general model. According to both offline and online experiments, the proposed MetaHeac shows superior effectiveness for both content marketing campaigns in recommender systems and advertising campaigns in advertising platforms. Besides, MetaHeac has been successfully deployed in WeChat for the promotion of both contents and advertisements, leading to great improvement in the quality of marketing. The code has been available at \url{https://github.com/easezyc/MetaHeac}.