# One Model to Serve All: Star Topology Adaptive Recommender for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11427/

## Key facts

- Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [DeepFM: A Factorization-Machine based Neural Network for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04247/) (2017)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03672/) (2018)
- [xDeepFM: Combining Explicit and Implicit Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05170/) (2018)
- [Search-based User Interest Modeling with Lifelong Sequential Behavior Data for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05639/) (2020)
- [Entire Space Multi-Task Model: An Effective Approach for Estimating Post-Click Conversion Rate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07931/) (2018)
- [Product-based Neural Networks for User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00144/) (2016)
- [Practice on Long Sequential User Behavior Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09248/) (2019)
- [Multi-Interest Network with Dynamic Routing for Recommendation at Tmall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08030/) (2019)
- [Deep Session Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06482/) (2019)
- [Optimized Cost per Click in Taobao Display Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02091/) (2017)
- [A Unified Perspective on Multi-Domain and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7489/) (2014)
- [One Person, One Model, One World: Learning Continual User Representation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13724/) (2020)
- [Multi-Domain Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09239/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [When MOE Meets LLMs: Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning for Multi-task Medical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18339/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding the Overfitting Phenomenon of Deep Click-Through Rate Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06053/) (2022)
- [M3oE: Multi-Domain Multi-Task Mixture-of Experts Recommendation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18465/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Taobao Display Advertising with Multimodal Representations: Challenges, Approaches and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19467/) (2024)
- [Joint Optimization of Ranking and Calibration with Contextualized Hybrid Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06164/) (2022)
- [Real Negatives Matter: Continuous Training with Real Negatives for Delayed Feedback Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14121/) (2021)
- [LLM4MSR: An LLM-Enhanced Paradigm for Multi-Scenario Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12529/) (2024)
- [Leaving No One Behind: A Multi-Scenario Multi-Task Meta Learning Approach for Advertiser Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06814/) (2022)
- [HoME: Hierarchy of Multi-Gate Experts for Multi-Task Learning at Kuaishou](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05430/) (2024)
- [Ads Recommendation in a Collapsed and Entangled World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00793/) (2024)
- [APG: Adaptive Parameter Generation Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16218/) (2022)
- [An Unified Search and Recommendation Foundation Model for Cold-Start Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08939/) (2023)
- [KEEP: An Industrial Pre-Training Framework for Online Recommendation via Knowledge Extraction and Plugging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10174/) (2022)
- [HiNet: Novel Multi-Scenario & Multi-Task Learning with Hierarchical Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06095/) (2023)
- [Rec4Ad: A Free Lunch to Mitigate Sample Selection Bias for Ads CTR Prediction in Taobao](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03527/) (2023)
- [Role Prompting Guided Domain Adaptation with General Capability Preserve for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02756/) (2024)
- [Automatic Expert Selection for Multi-Scenario and Multi-Task Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14321/) (2022)
- [Capturing Conversion Rate Fluctuation during Sales Promotions: A Novel Historical Data Reuse Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12837/) (2023)
- [AdaSparse: Learning Adaptively Sparse Structures for Multi-Domain Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13108/) (2022)
- [Scenario-Adaptive and Self-Supervised Model for Multi-Scenario Personalized Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11457/) (2022)
- [Task Relation-aware Continual User Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01792/) (2023)
- [A Collaborative Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-domain Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16425/) (2023)
- [Multi-Scenario Ranking with Adaptive Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16732/) (2023)
- [Multi-domain Recommendation with Embedding Disentangling and Domain Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05508/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Neural Ranking Framework: Toward Maximized Business Goal for Cascade Ranking Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10462/) (2023)
- [CAME: Competitively Learning a Mixture-of-Experts Model for First-stage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02834/) (2023)
- [LLM-RecG: A Semantic Bias-Aware Framework for Zero-Shot Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19232/) (2025)
- [MUSE: A Simple Yet Effective Multimodal Search-Based Framework for Lifelong User Interest Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07216/) (2025)
- [BASM: A Bottom-up Adaptive Spatiotemporal Model for Online Food Ordering Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12033/) (2022)
- [See Beyond a Single View: Multi-Attribution Learning Leads to Better Conversion Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15217/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional industrial recommenders are usually trained on a single business domain and then serve for this domain. However, in large commercial platforms, it is often the case that the recommenders need to make click-through rate (CTR) predictions for multiple business domains. Different domains have overlapping user groups and items. Thus, there exist commonalities. Since the specific user groups have disparity and the user behaviors may change in various business domains, there also have distinctions. The distinctions result in domain-specific data distributions, making it hard for a single shared model to work well on all domains. To learn an effective and efficient CTR model to handle multiple domains simultaneously, we present Star Topology Adaptive Recommender (STAR). Concretely, STAR has the star topology, which consists of the shared centered parameters and domain-specific parameters. The shared parameters are applied to learn commonalities of all domains, and the domain-specific parameters capture domain distinction for more refined prediction. Given requests from different business domains, STAR can adapt its parameters conditioned on the domain characteristics. The experimental result from production data validates the superiority of the proposed STAR model. Since 2020, STAR has been deployed in the display advertising system of Alibaba, obtaining averaging 8.0% improvement on CTR and 6.0% on RPM (Revenue Per Mille).