# Hierarchical Structure Sharing Empowers Multi-task Heterogeneous GNNs for Customer Expansion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [Are we really making much progress? Revisiting, benchmarking, and refining heterogeneous graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14936/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Heterogeneous Graph Embedding: Methods, Techniques, Applications and Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14867/) (2020)
- [An Attention-based Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Structural Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10832/) (2019)
- [Modeling the Sequential Dependence among Audience Multi-step Conversions with Multi-task Learning in Targeted Display Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08489/) (2021)
- [M2GRL: A Multi-task Multi-view Graph Representation Learning Framework for Web-scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10110/) (2020)
- [MugRep: A Multi-Task Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning Framework for Real Estate Appraisal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05180/) (2021)
- [Boosting Multitask Learning on Graphs through Higher-Order Task Affinities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14009/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Aggregate-then-Calibrate for Human-centered Assessment with Theoretical Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Customer expansion, i.e., growing a business existing customer base by acquiring new customers, is critical for scaling operations and sustaining the long-term profitability of logistics companies. Although state-of-the-art works model this task as a single-node classification problem under a heterogeneous graph learning framework and achieve good performance, they struggle with extremely positive label sparsity issues in our scenario. Multi-task learning (MTL) offers a promising solution by introducing a correlated, label-rich task to enhance the label-sparse task prediction through knowledge sharing. However, existing MTL methods result in performance degradation because they fail to discriminate task-shared and task-specific structural patterns across tasks. This issue arises from their limited consideration of the inherently complex structure learning process of heterogeneous graph neural networks, which involves the multi-layer aggregation of multi-type relations. To address the challenge, we propose a Structure-Aware Hierarchical Information Sharing Framework (SrucHIS), which explicitly regulates structural information sharing across tasks in logistics customer expansion. SrucHIS breaks down the structure learning phase into multiple stages and introduces sharing mechanisms at each stage, effectively mitigating the influence of task-specific structural patterns during each stage. We evaluate StrucHIS on both private and public datasets, achieving a 51.41% average precision improvement on the private dataset and a 10.52% macro F1 gain on the public dataset. StrucHIS is further deployed at one of the largest logistics companies in China and demonstrates a 41.67% improvement in the success contract-signing rate over existing strategies, generating over 453K new orders within just two months.