CETN: contrast-enhanced through network for click-through rate prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in personalized information retrievals, such as industrial recommender systems, online advertising, and web search. Most existing CTR Prediction models utilize explicit feature interactions to overcome the performance bottleneck of implicit feature interactions. Hence, deep CTR models based on parallel structures (e.g., DCN, FinalMLP, xDeepFM) have been proposed to obtain joint information from different semantic spaces. However, these parallel subcomponents lack effective supervision and communication signals, making it challenging to efficiently capture valuable multi-views feature interaction information in different semantic spaces. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective novel CTR model: Contrast-enhanced Through Network (CETN). Drawing inspiration from sociology, CETN leverages the complementary nature of diversity and homogeneity to guide the model in acquiring higher-quality feature interaction information. Specifically, CETN employs product-based feature interactions and the augmentation (perturbation) concept from contrastive learning to segment different semantic spaces, each with distinct activation functions. This improves diversity in the feature interaction information captured by the model. Additionally, we introduce self-supervised signals and through connection within each semantic space to ensure the homogeneity of the captured feature interaction information. The experiments conducted on four real datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms twenty baseline models in terms of AUC and Logloss.