# MAC: A Conversion Rate Prediction Benchmark Featuring Labels Under Multiple Attribution Mechanisms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04617/) (2021)
- [Entire Space Multi-Task Model: An Effective Approach for Estimating Post-Click Conversion Rate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07931/) (2018)
- [Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05874/) (2020)
- [Adapting Auxiliary Losses Using Gradient Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02224/) (2018)
- [Learning Tree-based Deep Model for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02294/) (2018)
- [One Model to Serve All: Star Topology Adaptive Recommender for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11427/) (2021)
- [Auto-Lambda: Disentangling Dynamic Task Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03091/) (2022)
- [ESCM2: Entire Space Counterfactual Multi-Task Model for Post-Click Conversion Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05125/) (2022)
- [RankMixer: Scaling Up Ranking Models in Industrial Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15551/) (2025)
- [Towards Understanding the Overfitting Phenomenon of Deep Click-Through Rate Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06053/) (2022)
- [Auxiliary Task Reweighting for Minimum-data Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08244/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Capturing Delayed Feedback in Conversion Rate Prediction via Elapsed-Time Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03245/) (2020)
- [HoME: Hierarchy of Multi-Gate Experts for Multi-Task Learning at Kuaishou](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05430/) (2024)
- [Asymptotically Unbiased Estimation for Delayed Feedback Modeling via Label Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06472/) (2022)
- [Deep Neural Net with Attention for Multi-channel Multi-touch Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02230/) (2018)
- [CAMTA: Causal Attention Model for Multi-touch Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11403/) (2020)
- [CausalMTA: Eliminating the User Confounding Bias for Causal Multi-touch Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00689/) (2021)
- [AdaTT: Adaptive Task-to-Task Fusion Network for Multitask Learning in Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04959/) (2023)
- [Capturing Conversion Rate Fluctuation during Sales Promotions: A Novel Historical Data Reuse Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12837/) (2023)
- [Entire Space Cascade Delayed Feedback Modeling for Effective Conversion Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04768/) (2023)
- [See Beyond a Single View: Multi-Attribution Learning Leads to Better Conversion Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15217/) (2025)
- [LiDDA: Data Driven Attribution at LinkedIn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09861/) (2025)

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

- [Can Large Language Models Identify Meaningful Touchpoints in Conversion Attribution?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28649/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-attribution learning (MAL), which enhances model performance by learning from conversion labels yielded by multiple attribution mechanisms, has emerged as a promising learning paradigm for conversion rate (CVR) prediction. However, the conversion labels in public CVR datasets are generated by a single attribution mechanism, hindering the development of MAL approaches. To address this data gap, we establish the Multi-Attribution Benchmark (MAC), the first public CVR dataset featuring labels from multiple attribution mechanisms. Besides, to promote reproducible research on MAL, we develop PyMAL, an open-source library covering a wide array of baseline methods. We conduct comprehensive experimental analyses on MAC and reveal three key insights: (1) MAL brings consistent performance gains across different attribution settings, especially for users featuring long conversion paths. (2) The performance growth scales up with objective complexity in most settings; however, when predicting first-click conversion targets, simply adding auxiliary objectives is counterproductive, underscoring the necessity of careful selection of auxiliary objectives. (3) Two architectural design principles are paramount: first, to fully learn the multi-attribution knowledge, and second, to fully leverage this knowledge to serve the main task. Motivated by these findings, we propose Mixture of Asymmetric Experts (MoAE), an effective MAL approach incorporating multi-attribution knowledge learning and main task-centric knowledge utilization. Experiments on MAC show that MoAE substantially surpasses the existing state-of-the-art MAL method. We believe that our benchmark and insights will foster future research in the MAL field. Our MAC benchmark and the PyMAL algorithm library are publicly available at https://github.com/alimama-tech/PyMAL.