Title: ALM-MTA: Front-Door Causal Multi-Touch Attribution Method for Creator-Ecosystem Optimization
Primary area: causal reasoning
Keywords: causal reasoning, multi‑touch-attribution, recommendation system

Abstract: Consumption‑Drives‑Production (CDP) on social platforms aims to deliver interpretable incentive signals for creator‑ecosystem building and resource utilization improvement, which strongly relies on attributions. In large-scale and complex recommendation system, the absence of accurate labels together with unobserved confounding renders backdoor adjustments alone insufficient for reliable attribution. To address these problems, we propose Adversarial Learning Mediator based Multi‑Touch-Attribution (ALM-MTA), an extensible causal framework that leverages front-door identification with an adversarially learned mediator: a proxy trained to distillate outcome information to strengthen causal pathway from treatment to outcome and eliminate shortcut leakage. Then, we introduce contrastive learning that conditions front door marginalization on high match consumption upload pairs for ensuring positivity in large treatment spaces. To assess causality from non‑RCT logs, we also incorporate a non‑personalized bucketed protocol, estimating grouped uplift and computing AUUC over treatment clusters. Finally, we evaluate ALM-MTA performance using a real-world recommendation system with 400 million DAU (daily active users) and 30 billion samples. ALM-MTA has increased DAU with 0.04% and 0.6% of the daily active creators, with unit exposure efficiency increased by 670%. On causal utility, ALM-MTA achieves higher grouped AUUC than the SOTA in every propensity bucket, with a maximum gain of 0.070. In terms of accuracy, ALM-MTA improves upload AUC by 40% compared to SOTA. These results demonstrate that front -door deconfounding with adversarial mediator learning provides accurate, personalized and operationally efficient attribution for creator ecosystem optimization.