  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.

Machine Learning;Artificial Intelligence