Progressive Learning from Content to Relevance to Personalization for CTR Prediction

Overview & Synopsis

Multimodal click-through rate (CTR) prediction is central to search systems, where ranking depends on item content, query relevance, and user preference. Existing approaches incorporate content through dense embeddings or coarse discrete IDs, yet effectively integrating fine-grained heterogeneous content with ID-based predictors remains challenging. We propose FineSID, a progressive learning framework that unifies content tokenization, query--item semantic pretraining, and personalized post-training via a shared fine-grained discrete representation. Each stage optimizes an explicit objective while preserving token-level access to content. First, a pretrained multi-scale visual tokenizer and text tokenizers convert heterogeneous content into fine-grained Semantic IDs (SIDs), explicitly aligning them with the ID features. Second, full-parameter semantic pretraining under query--item relevance supervision establishes a robust matching prior, jointly optimizing the interactions of multimodal SIDs and conventional fields within a shared predictor. Third, this initialized predictor is directly fine-tuned with user click supervision to capture implicit personalized preferences. Extensive offline and online evaluations demonstrate substantial gains in both standard CTR prediction and core business metrics. Furthermore, FineSID improves within-product creative discrimination, demonstrating its semantic generalization beyond conventional ID memorization.