Customer lifetime value (LTV) is crucial to companies who are intending to adopt personalized promoting strategies to optimize the profits. However, LTV prediction in the scenario of online App advertising usually suffers from label sparsity issue, towards which existing methods designed complex model structures but ignored the information contained in intermediate user behaviors. Moreover, previous works mainly focus on fitting the overall LTV distribution, overlooking the fact that LTV in online App advertising consists of sources with diverse data distributions and thus resulting in sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel Progressive Tasks guided Multi-Source Network (PTMSN) to tackle the aforementioned problems. Specifically, a Cascaded Sub-task Module (CSM) is introduced to alleviate data sparsity by modeling reliance between explicit interactions and implicit monetization. In addition, as the overall LTV is assembled from multiple sources, we propose a divide-and-conquer scheme named Multi-source Integrating Module (MIM) to disentangle the original single target into several source distributions and model in a fine-grained manner. Extensive offline experiments on real-world industrial datasets compared to state-of-the-art baseline models validate the effectiveness of our approach. PTMSN has been successfully deployed in industrial online advertising system, serving various business scenarios and acquiring 2.97% absolute ROI gains.

In recent years, the global repercussions of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants have posed significant challenges to various areas, including the economic order, transportation, healthcare, and education, and the mitigation and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases have received much attention. This paper tries to develop a rational and effective intervention strategy in response to the dynamic evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. To address this issue, we first use the SEIR model to analyze the population distribution under the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, and then integrate a deep Q-neural network (DQN) to reflect an economic quantification model contextualized within the SARS-CoV-2 scenario. Next, we propose an evolutionary deep reinforcement learning to generate an optimal and adaptive intervention strategy, by optimizing the weight sequence of the DQN. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in maximizing economic benefits, while ensuring the uninterrupted functionality of medical institutions. Importantly, the learned intervention strategy exhibits the applicability to other infectious diseases.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) have received widespread attention due to their ability to utilize rich information across domains. However, most existing CDR methods assume an ideal static condition that is not practical in industrial recommendation systems (RS). Therefore, simply applying existing CDR methods in the industrial RS environment may lead to low effectiveness and efficiency. To fill this gap, we propose DIIT, an end-to-end Domain-Invariant Information Transfer method for industrial cross-domain recommendation. Specifically, We first simulate the industrial RS environment that maintains respective models in multiple domains, each of them is trained in the incremental mode. Then, for improving the effectiveness, we design two extractors to fully extract domain-invariant information from the latest source domain models at the domain level and the representation level respectively. Finally, for improving the efficiency, we design a migrator to transfer the extracted information to the latest target domain model, which only need the target domain model for inference. Experiments conducted on one production dataset and two public datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of DIIT.