Papers › DeepLight: Deep Lightweight Feature Interactions for Accelerating CTR Predictions in Ad Serving
DeepLight: Deep Lightweight Feature Interactions for Accelerating CTR Predictions in Ad Serving
Wei Deng, Junwei Pan, Tian Zhou, Deguang Kong, Aaron Flores, Guang Lin
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in online display advertising. The embedding-based neural networks have been proposed to learn both explicit feature interactions through a shallow component and deep feature interactions using a deep neural network (DNN) component. These sophisticated models, however, slow down the prediction inference by at least hundreds of times. To address the issue of significantly increased serving delay and high memory usage for ad serving in production, this paper presents \emph{DeepLight}: a framework to accelerate the CTR predictions in three aspects: 1) accelerate the model inference via explicitly searching informative feature interactions in the shallow component; 2) prune redundant layers and parameters at intra-layer and inter-layer level in the DNN component; 3) promote the sparsity of the embedding layer to preserve the most discriminant signals. By combining the above efforts, the proposed approach accelerates the model inference by 46X on Criteo dataset and 27X on Avazu dataset without any loss on the prediction accuracy. This paves the way for successfully deploying complicated embedding-based neural networks in production for ad serving.
Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Click-Through Rate Prediction | Avazu | Sparse Deep FwFM | AUC | 0.7897 | #8 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Click-Through Rate Prediction | Avazu | Sparse Deep FwFM | LogLoss | 0.3748 | #8 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Click-Through Rate Prediction | Criteo | DeepLight | AUC | 0.8123 | #12 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Click-Through Rate Prediction | Criteo | DeepLight | Log Loss | 0.4395 | #12 of 39 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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