Temporal Hierarchical Attention at Category- and Item-Level for Micro-Video Click-Through Prediction

Micro-video sharing gains great popularity in recent years, which calls for effective recommendation algorithm to help user find their interested micro-videos. Compared with traditional online (e.g. YouTube) videos, micro-videos contributed by grass-root users and taken by smartphones are much shorter (tens of seconds) and more short of tags or descriptive text, making the recommendation of micro-videos a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate how to model user's historical behaviors so as to predict the user's click-through of micro-videos. Inspired by the recent deep network-based methods, we propose a Temporal Hierarchical Attention at Category- and Item-Level (THACIL) network for user behavior modeling. First, we use temporal windows to capture the short-term dynamics of user interests; Second, we leverage a category-level attention mechanism to characterize user's diverse interests, as well as an item-level attention mechanism for fine-grained profiling of user interests; Third, we adopt forward multi-head self-attention to capture the long-term correlation within user behaviors. Our proposed THACIL network was tested on MicroVideo-1.7M, a new dataset of 1.7 million micro-videos, coming from real data of a micro-video sharing service in China. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions.