AutoOpt: Automatic Hyperparameter Scheduling and Optimization for Deep Click-through Rate Prediction

Yujun Li, Xing Tang, Bo Chen, Yimin Huang, Ruiming Tang, Zhenguo Li

Abstract: Click-through Rate (CTR) prediction is essential for commercial recommender systems. Recently, to improve the prediction accuracy, plenty of deep learning-based CTR models have been proposed, which are sensitive to hyperparameters and difficult to optimize well. General hyperparameter optimization methods fix these hyperparameters across the entire model training and repeat them multiple times. This trial-and-error process not only leads to suboptimal performance but also requires non-trivial computation efforts. In this paper, we propose an automatic hyperparameters scheduling and optimization method for deep CTR models, AutoOpt, making the optimization process more stable and efficient. Specifically, the whole training regime is firstly divided into several consecutive stages, where a data-efficient model is learned to model the relation between model states and prediction performance. To optimize the stage-wise hyperparameters, AutoOpt uses the global and local scheduling modules to propose proper hyperparameters for the next stage based on the training in the current stage. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks are conducted to validate the effectiveness of AutoOpt. Moreover, AutoOpt has been deployed onto an advertising platform and a music platform, where online A/B tests also demonstrate superior improvement. In addition, the code of our algorithm is publicly available in MindSpore1.