← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2610.37140 · v1
Rethinking Positional Encoding and Interaction Granularity for CTR Prediction
首次提交 2026-10-27 20:35
版本更新 2026-10-27 20:35
雷达观测 2026-10-29 00:35
摘要
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction relies on historical behaviors and contextual features to estimate clicks on a target item. Existing Transformer-based CTR models often adopt index-based or temporal positional encodings and token-level causal interaction. However, we observe that most existing positional encodings do not outperform NoPE, while relaxing causal constraints within target-relative temporal groups also yields gains. These observations motivate a fundamental question: what positional encoding and interaction granularity does CTR prediction actually require? To address this question, we propose \textbf{TRIP}, which combines target-aware rank--time positional encoding with temporal-group interaction modeling. Specifically, Factorized Rank Encoding represents each behavior's ordinal position within the historical sequence through a low-rank factorization, while Target-Relative Time Encoding characterizes its temporal distance to the target on a coarse-to-fine scale. This joint design grounds each behavior's positional representation in its sequence context and temporal relation to the current target. Furthermore, Temporal Group-Causal Interaction enriches intra-group representations through bidirectional interaction and masked reconstruction while preserving inter-group causal order. Finally, behavior representations are condensed into compact group summaries for efficient group-level modeling in subsequent layers. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that TRIP improves AUC by up to 4.45\% relative to the strongest baseline.
作者备注：13 pages, 11 figures
观测到的版本
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v1 · 2026-10-27 20:35 · 最新观测版本
Rethinking Positional Encoding and Interaction Granularity for CTR Prediction
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction relies on historical behaviors and contextual features to estimate clicks on a target item. Existing Transformer-based CTR models often adopt index-based or temporal positional encodings and token-level causal interaction. However, we observe that most existing positional encodings do not outperform NoPE, while relaxing causal constraints within target-relative temporal groups also yields gains. These observations motivate a fundamental question: what positional encoding and interaction granularity does CTR prediction actually require? To address this question, we propose \textbf{TRIP}, which combines target-aware rank--time positional encoding with temporal-group interaction modeling. Specifically, Factorized Rank Encoding represents each behavior's ordinal position within the historical sequence through a low-rank factorization, while Target-Relative Time Encoding characterizes its temporal distance to the target on a coarse-to-fine scale. This joint design grounds each behavior's positional representation in its sequence context and temporal relation to the current target. Furthermore, Temporal Group-Causal Interaction enriches intra-group representations through bidirectional interaction and masked reconstruction while preserving inter-group causal order. Finally, behavior representations are condensed into compact group summaries for efficient group-level modeling in subsequent layers. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that TRIP improves AUC by up to 4.45\% relative to the strongest baseline.
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