Attention-based Multi-Behavior Sequential Network for E-commerce Recommendation

Abstract: The original intention of the recommender system is to solve the problem of information explosion, hoping to help users find the content they need more efficiently. In an e-commerce platform, users typically interact with items that they are interested in or need in a variety of ways. For example, buying, browsing details, etc. These interactions are recorded as time-series information. How to use this sequential information to predict user behaviors in the future and give an efficient and effective recommendation is a very important problem. For content providers, such as merchants in e-commerce platforms, more accurate recommendation means higher traffic, CTR (click-through rate), and revenue. Therefore, in the industry, the CTR model for recommendation systems is a research hotspot. However, in the fine ranking stage of the recommendation system, the existing models have some limitations. No researcher has attempted to predict multiple behaviors of one user simultaneously by processing sequential information. We define this problem as the multi-task sequential recommendation problem. In response to this problem, we study the CTR model, sequential recommendation, and multi-task learning. Based on these studies, this paper proposes AMBSN (Attention-based Multi-Behavior Sequential Network). Specifically, we added a transformer layer, the activation unit, and the multi-task tower to the traditional Embedding&MLP (multi-layer perceptron) model. The transformer layer enables our model to efficiently extract sequential behavior information, the activation unit can understand user interests, and the multi-task tower structure makes the model give the prediction of different user behaviors at the same time. We choose user behavior data from Taobao for recommendation published on TianChi as the dataset, and AUC as the evaluation criterion. We compare the performance of AMBSN and some other models on the test set after training. The final results of the experiment show that our model outperforms some existing models.