arXiv:2510.04816cs.LGcs.AI2025-10中稿 · publication at the…

用因果推理给未点击项生成转化标签,提升推荐系统转化率预测精度。

On Predicting Post-Click Conversion Rate via Counterfactual Inference

  • 基于因果模型对未点击项进行假设点击干预,推断其可能的转化率。
  • 在公开数据集上显著优于基线方法,线上测试验证实际效果。
  • 适用于需要高精度转化预估的电商与广告推荐场景。

准确预测转化率(CVR)在在线广告和电商推荐系统中至关重要。这些系统依赖曝光、点击和转化的日志数据,但传统模型仅使用点击样本训练,因点击样本稀疏,需大量日志才能有效训练。近期研究尝试利用未点击样本,但多依赖启发式方法。本文提出一种基于因果推理的方法——全空间反事实推断多任务模型(ESCIM),通过构建用户行为的结构因果模型(SCM),对未点击项进行假设点击干预,推断其反事实转化率。随后将预测的反事实转化率转化为二值标签,加入训练。在多个公开数据集上的实验表明该方法性能优越,线上A/B测试进一步验证了其在真实场景中的有效性。此外,该方法在潜在转化数据上也表现更优,展现出更强的鲁棒性和泛化能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurately predicting conversion rate (CVR) is essential in various recommendation domains such as online advertising systems and e-commerce. These systems utilize user interaction logs, which consist of exposures, clicks, and conversions. CVR prediction models are typically trained solely based on clicked samples, as conversions can only be determined following clicks. However, the sparsity of clicked instances necessitates the collection of a substantial amount of logs for effective model training. Recent works address this issue by devising frameworks that leverage non-clicked samples. While these frameworks aim to reduce biases caused by the discrepancy between clicked and non-clicked samples, they often rely on heuristics. Against this background, we propose a method to counterfactually generate conversion labels for non-clicked samples by using causality as a guiding principle, attempting to answer the question, "Would the user have converted if he or she had clicked the recommended item?" Our approach is named the Entire Space Counterfactual Inference Multi-task Model (ESCIM). We initially train a structural causal model (SCM) of user sequential behaviors and conduct a hypothetical intervention (i.e., click) on non-clicked items to infer counterfactual CVRs. We then introduce several approaches to transform predicted counterfactual CVRs into binary counterfactual conversion labels for the non-clicked samples. Finally, the generated samples are incorporated into the training process. Extensive experiments on public datasets illustrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm. Online A/B testing further empirically validates the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in real-world scenarios. In addition, we demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method on latent conversion data, showcasing its robustness and superior generalization capabilities.

转化率预测因果推断推荐系统

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