Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE): A Novel Multi-Task Learning (MTL) Model for Personalized Recommendations

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been successfully applied to many recommendation applications. However, MTL models often suffer from performance degeneration with negative transfer due to the complex and competing task correlation in real-world recommender systems. Moreover, through extensive experiments across SOTA MTL models, we have observed an interesting seesaw phenomenon that performance of one task is often improved by hurting the performance of some other tasks. To address these issues, we propose a Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE) model with a novel sharing structure design. PLE separates shared components and task-specific components explicitly and adopts a progressive routing mechanism to extract…