Challenge

Build & Evaluate GDCN-Final Fusion Agent on Criteo

Gated Deep Cross Network (GDCN) enhances Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction in recommender systems by improving interpretability. Implement the state-of-the-art GDCN-Final Fusion Agent architecture from scratch, leveraging its dual-gated GDCN stream, feature-selected MLP stream, and bilinear fusion. The challenge involves developing a robust data pipeline for the Criteo dataset, including log-binning for numerical features, training the model, and establishing a rigorous AUC evaluation harness. Practitioners will demonstrate their ability to translate a complex architectural description into a working deep learning model and rigorously assess its performance. This task simulates a real-world scenario where an ML engineer must reproduce a research paper's findings, ensuring all nuanced components are correctly implemented and evaluated on a large-scale industrial dataset. The focus is on correctness, efficiency, and achieving competitive AUC scores while maintaining a reproducible training and evaluation pipeline.

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Challenge brief

What you are building

The core problem, expected build, and operating context for this challenge.

Gated Deep Cross Network (GDCN) enhances Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction in recommender systems by improving interpretability. Implement the state-of-the-art GDCN-Final Fusion Agent architecture from scratch, leveraging its dual-gated GDCN stream, feature-selected MLP stream, and bilinear fusion. The challenge involves developing a robust data pipeline for the Criteo dataset, including log-binning for numerical features, training the model, and establishing a rigorous AUC evaluation harness. Practitioners will demonstrate their ability to translate a complex architectural description into a working deep learning model and rigorously assess its performance. This task simulates a real-world scenario where an ML engineer must reproduce a research paper's findings, ensuring all nuanced components are correctly implemented and evaluated on a large-scale industrial dataset. The focus is on correctness, efficiency, and achieving competitive AUC scores while maintaining a reproducible training and evaluation pipeline.

Datasets

Shared data for this challenge

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Learning goals

What you should walk away with

Learning objectives will be added soon

Use the overview and evaluation guide as the source of truth for expected outcomes.

How this agent runs

The solution will be evaluated based on the correctness of the GDCN-Final Fusion Agent implementation, the stability of the training process, and the achieved AUC performance on a held-out validation set of the Criteo...

Preview configuration

Challenge input

{ "train_data_path": "<path_to_train_csv>", "test_data_path": "<path_to_test_csv>", "config": { "embedding_dim": 16, "hidden_units": [256, 128], "c...

Agent execution

The configured agent processes the input under the challenge policy.

Evaluated output

{ "auc_score": <float>, "model_weights_path": "<path_to_saved_model.pth>", "training_log": "<full_training_log_string>" }

Checks for
  • The provided code must execute the training and evaluation steps without critical runtime errors.
  • The trained model weights must be successfully saved to the specified path and be loadable.
Proof of success
  • Final Auc target: 0.815
Runtime evidence
  • Docker execution harness
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Configured tools

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Evaluation contract

  • The evaluation module defines the checks.

Recipe state

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Run this agent on your dataset and AI stack

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Start from your terminal
$npx -y @versalist/cli start build-evaluate-gdcn-final-fusion-agent-on-criteo

[ok] Wrote CHALLENGE.md

[ok] Wrote .versalist.json

[ok] Wrote eval/examples.json

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