FLMNet: Self-Ensemble Distillation from Masks to Seeds for Single-Tower CTR Prediction
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction underpins recommender systems and online advertising, where high-dimensional categorical features interact in combinatorially many ways. Several recent CTR models, such as FinalNet and QNN, report higher accuracy when a network also learns from its own averaged predictions, for example by running the same network under different dropout patterns and training each run toward the average. Why this self-distillation helps, and whether its random sampling is needed, remains unclear. This work shows that as the number of dropout patterns grows without bound, the objective reduces exactly to the label loss of the logit-averaged prediction plus a penalty on ho...
| Authors | Yifan Wang, Yifei Du |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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