No Arabic abstract
Deep learning-based models are utilized to achieve state-of-the-art performance for recommendation systems. A key challenge for these models is to work with millions of categorical classes or tokens. The standard approach is to learn end-to-end, dense latent representations or embeddings for each token. The resulting embeddings require large amounts of memory that blow up with the number of tokens. Training and inference with these models create storage, and memory bandwidth bottlenecks leading to significant computing and energy consumption when deployed in practice. To this end, we present the problem of textit{Memory Allocation} under budget for embeddings and propose a novel formulation of memory shared embedding, where memory is shared in proportion to the overlap in semantic information. Our formulation admits a practical and efficient randomized solution with Locality sensitive hashing based Memory Allocation (LMA). We demonstrate a significant reduction in the memory footprint while maintaining performance. In particular, our LMA embeddings achieve the same performance compared to standard embeddings with a 16$times$ reduction in memory footprint. Moreover, LMA achieves an average improvement of over 0.003 AUC across different memory regimes than standard DLRM models on Criteo and Avazu datasets
Practical large-scale recommender systems usually contain thousands of feature fields from users, items, contextual information, and their interactions. Most of them empirically allocate a unified dimension to all feature fields, which is memory inefficient. Thus it is highly desired to assign different embedding dimensions to different feature fields according to their importance and predictability. Due to the large amounts of feature fields and the nuanced relationship between embedding dimensions with feature distributions and neural network architectures, manually allocating embedding dimensions in practical recommender systems can be very difficult. To this end, we propose an AutoML based framework (AutoDim) in this paper, which can automatically select dimensions for different feature fields in a data-driven fashion. Specifically, we first proposed an end-to-end differentiable framework that can calculate the weights over various dimensions for feature fields in a soft and continuous manner with an AutoML based optimization algorithm; then we derive a hard and discrete embedding component architecture according to the maximal weights and retrain the whole recommender framework. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness of the AutoDim framework.
For better user satisfaction and business effectiveness, more and more attention has been paid to the sequence-based recommendation system, which is used to infer the evolution of users dynamic preferences, and recent studies have noticed that the evolution of users preferences can be better understood from the implicit and explicit feedback sequences. However, most of the existing recommendation techniques do not consider the noise contained in implicit feedback, which will lead to the biased representation of user interest and a suboptimal recommendation performance. Meanwhile, the existing methods utilize item sequence for capturing the evolution of user interest. The performance of these methods is limited by the length of the sequence, and can not effectively model the long-term interest in a long period of time. Based on this observation, we propose a novel CTR model named denoising user-aware memory network (DUMN). Specifically, the framework: (i) proposes a feature purification module based on orthogonal mapping, which use the representation of explicit feedback to purify the representation of implicit feedback, and effectively denoise the implicit feedback; (ii) designs a user memory network to model the long-term interests in a fine-grained way by improving the memory network, which is ignored by the existing methods; and (iii) develops a preference-aware interactive representation component to fuse the long-term and short-term interests of users based on gating to understand the evolution of unbiased preferences of users. Extensive experiments on two real e-commerce user behavior datasets show that DUMN has a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The code of DUMN model has been uploaded as an additional material.
Production recommendation systems rely on embedding methods to represent various features. An impeding challenge in practice is that the large embedding matrix incurs substantial memory footprint in serving as the number of features grows over time. We propose a similarity-aware embedding matrix compression method called Saec to address this challenge. Saec clusters similar features within a field to reduce the embedding matrix size. Saec also adopts a fast clustering optimization based on feature frequency to drastically improve clustering time. We implement and evaluate Saec on Numerous, the production distributed machine learning system in Tencent, with 10-day worth of feature data from QQ mobile browser. Testbed experiments show that Saec reduces the number of embedding vectors by two orders of magnitude, compresses the embedding size by ~27x, and delivers the same AUC and log loss performance.
How data is represented and operationalized is critical for building computational solutions that are both effective and efficient. A common approach is to represent data objects as binary vectors, denoted textit{hash codes}, which require little storage and enable efficient similarity search through direct indexing into a hash table or through similarity computations in an appropriate space. Due to the limited expressibility of hash codes, compared to real-valued representations, a core open challenge is how to generate hash codes that well capture semantic content or latent properties using a small number of bits, while ensuring that the hash codes are distributed in a way that does not reduce their search efficiency. State of the art methods use representation learning for generating such hash codes, focusing on neural autoencoder architectures where semantics are encoded into the hash codes by learning to reconstruct the original inputs of the hash codes. This thesis addresses the above challenge and makes a number of contributions to representation learning that (i) improve effectiveness of hash codes through more expressive representations and a more effective similarity measure than the current state of the art, namely the Hamming distance, and (ii) improve efficiency of hash codes by learning representations that are especially suited to the choice of search method. The contributions are empirically validated on several tasks related to similarity search and recommendation.
Recommender systems are gaining increasing and critical impacts on human and society since a growing number of users use them for information seeking and decision making. Therefore, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems in recommendations. Just like users have personalized preferences on items, users demands for fairness are also personalized in many scenarios. Therefore, it is important to provide personalized fair recommendations for users to satisfy their personalized fairness demands. Besides, previous works on fair recommendation mainly focus on association-based fairness. However, it is important to advance from associative fairness notions to causal fairness notions for assessing fairness more properly in recommender systems. Based on the above considerations, this paper focuses on achieving personalized counterfactual fairness for users in recommender systems. To this end, we introduce a framework for achieving counterfactually fair recommendations through adversary learning by generating feature-independent user embeddings for recommendation. The framework allows recommender systems to achieve personalized fairness for users while also covering non-personalized situations. Experiments on two real-world datasets with shallow and deep recommendation algorithms show that our method can generate fairer recommendations for users with a desirable recommendation performance.