Uplift modeling has shown very promising results in online marketing.
However, most existing works are prone to the robustness challenge in some
practical applications. In this paper, we first present a possible explanation
for the above phenomenon. We verify that there is a feature sensitivity problem
in online marketing using different real-world datasets, where the perturbation
of some key features will seriously affect the performance of the uplift model
and even cause the opposite trend. To solve the above problem, we propose a
novel robustness-enhanced uplift modeling framework with adversarial feature
desensitization (RUAD). Specifically, our RUAD can more effectively alleviate
the feature sensitivity of the uplift model through two customized modules,
including a feature selection module with joint multi-label modeling to
identify a key subset from the input features and an adversarial feature
desensitization module using adversarial training and soft interpolation
operations to enhance the robustness of the model against this selected subset
of features. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a public dataset and
a real product dataset to verify the effectiveness of our RUAD in online
marketing. In addition, we also demonstrate the robustness of our RUAD to the
feature sensitivity, as well as the compatibility with different uplift models.

提出了一种新的强化鲁棒性的提升建模框架 RUAD，通过两个定制模块，即联合多标签建模的特征选择模块和利用对抗训练和软插值操作的对抗性特征去敏模块，更有效地缓解提升模型的特征敏感性，从而提高在线营销中的效果和鲁棒性。