Abstract

Online advertising has seen exponential growth transforming into a vast and dynamic market that encompasses many diverse platforms such web search, e-commerce, social media and mobile apps. The rapid growth of products and services presents a formidable challenge for advertising platforms, and accurately modeling user intent is increasingly critical for targeted ad placement. The 2023 ACM RecSys Challenge, organized by ShareChat, provides a standardized benchmark for developing and evaluating user intent models using a large dataset of impression from the ShareChat and Moj apps. In this paper we present our approach to this challenge. We use Transformers to automatically capture interactions between different types of input features, and propose a self-supervised optimization framework based on the contrastive objective. Empirically, we demonstrate that self-supervised learning effectively reduces overfitting improving model generalization and leading to significant gains in performance. Our team, Layer 6 AI, achieved 1st place on the final leaderboard out of over 100 teams.