Alibaba International Intelligent Technology

Sep 18, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

UTTSI: Test-Time Selective Inference Boosts CTR Prediction Without Retraining

Alibaba researchers propose UTTSI, a training-free, model-agnostic framework that estimates per-sample uncertainty at inference time using frequency priors and gradient-based attribution, then adaptively allocates compute — filtering noisy features and exploring multiple inference paths only for uncertain samples — achieving a 5.3% CTR lift in a 7-day online A/B test with just 2.8× average model calls.