HiNet: Novel Multi-Scenario & Multi-Task Learning with Hierarchical Information Extraction

Abstract: Multi-scenario & multi-task learning has been widely applied to many recommendation systems in industrial applications, wherein an effective and practical approach is to carry out multi-scenario transfer learning on the basis of the Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) architecture. However, the MoE-based method, which aims to project all information in the same feature space, cannot effectively deal with the complex relationships inherent among various scenarios and tasks, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. To tackle the problem, we propose a Hierarchical information extraction Network (HiNet) for multi-scenario and multi-task recommendation, which achieves hierarchical extraction based on coarse-to-fine knowledge transfer scheme. The multiple extraction layers of the hierarchical network enable the model to enhance the capability of transferring valuable information across scenarios while preserving specific features of scenarios and tasks. Furthermore, a novel scenario-aware attentive network module is proposed to model correlations between scenarios explicitly. Comprehensive experiments conducted on real-world industrial datasets from Meituan Meishi platform demonstrate that HiNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms existing solutions. HiNet is currently fully deployed in two scenarios and has achieved 2.87% and 1.75% order quantity gain respectively.