Papers › AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networks

AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networks

29 Oct 2018arXiv:1810.11921archive 2025-07-28

Weiping Song, Chence Shi, Zhiping Xiao, Zhijian Duan, Yewen Xu, Ming Zhang, Jian Tang

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, which aims to predict the probability of a user clicking on an ad or an item, is critical to many online applications such as online advertising and recommender systems. The problem is very challenging since (1) the input features (e.g., the user id, user age, item id, item category) are usually sparse and high-dimensional, and (2) an effective prediction relies on high-order combinatorial features (\textit{a.k.a.} cross features), which are very time-consuming to hand-craft by domain experts and are impossible to be enumerated. Therefore, there have been efforts in finding low-dimensional representations of the sparse and high-dimensional raw features and their meaningful combinations. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method called the \emph{AutoInt} to automatically learn the high-order feature interactions of input features. Our proposed algorithm is very general, which can be applied to both numerical and categorical input features. Specifically, we map both the numerical and categorical features into the same low-dimensional space. Afterwards, a multi-head self-attentive neural network with residual connections is proposed to explicitly model the feature interactions in the low-dimensional space. With different layers of the multi-head self-attentive neural networks, different orders of feature combinations of input features can be modeled. The whole model can be efficiently fit on large-scale raw data in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that our proposed approach not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for prediction but also offers good explainability. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/RecommenderSystems}.

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19 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

DeepGraphLearning/RecommenderSystems officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
DaPenggg/AutoInt mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
UlionTse/mlgb mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
cripac-dig/graphctr mentioned on GitHubtf report
manujosephv/pytorch_tabular mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
massquantity/LibRecommender mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
shenweichen/DeepCTR mentioned on GitHubtf report
shenweichen/DeepCTR-Torch mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
shichence/AutoInt mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
sparsh-ai/RecommenderSystems mentioned on GitHubtfnot reachable when probed 2026-09-18 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report
xue-pai/FuxiCTR mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
MindSpore-scientific/code-4 mindsporeApache-2.0 report

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multihead_attention shichence/AutoInt/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 35a991d0d6aff6ae · report
normalize shichence/AutoInt/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 3feb4890a602698e · report
scale shichence/AutoInt/Dataprocess/Criteo/scale.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 4826b8c64d0b0c38 · report

Tasks

Click-Through Rate PredictionRecommendation Systems

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Click-Through Rate Prediction Avazu AutoInt AUC 0.7752 #11 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction Avazu AutoInt LogLoss 0.3823 #11 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction Criteo AutoInt AUC 0.8061 #27 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction Criteo AutoInt Log Loss 0.4454 #27 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction KDD12 AutoInt AUC 0.7881 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction KDD12 AutoInt Log Loss 0.1545 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction KKBox AutoInt+ AUC 0.8534 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction MovieLens 1M AutoInt AUC 0.846 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Click-Through Rate Prediction MovieLens 1M AutoInt Log Loss 0.3784 #6 of 6 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.

Methods

AutoInt

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