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Deep Retrieval: A Learnable Structure Model for Large-Scale Recommendations (arxiv.org)
1 point by ot on Jul 24, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of scoring items with dot products and searching for nearby ones, it learns codes from clicks and walks them, following several paths at once, to find candidates. It nearly matched checking every item while searching far less, and beat a tuned version in production.

Abstract · Deep Retrieval: Learning A Retrievable Structure for Large-Scale Recommendations

One of the core problems in large-scale recommendations is to retrieve top relevant candidates accurately and efficiently, preferably in sub-linear time. Previous approaches are mostly based on a two-step procedure: first learn an inner-product model, and then use some approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithm to find top candidates. In this paper, we present Deep Retrieval (DR), to learn a retrievable structure directly with user-item interaction data (e.g. clicks) without resorting to the Euclidean space assumption in ANN algorithms. DR's structure encodes all candidate items into a discrete latent space. Those latent codes for the candidates are model parameters and learnt together with other neural network parameters to maximize the same objective function. With the model learnt, a beam search over the structure is performed to retrieve the top candidates for reranking. Empirically, we first demonstrate that DR, with sub-linear computational complexity, can achieve almost the same accuracy as the brute-force baseline on two public datasets. Moreover, we show that, in a live production recommendation system, a deployed DR approach significantly outperforms a well-tuned ANN baseline in terms of engagement metrics. To the best of our knowledge, DR is among the first non-ANN algorithms successfully deployed at the scale of hundreds of millions of items for industrial recommendation systems.

Weihao Gao, Xiangjun Fan, Chong Wang, Jiankai Sun, Kai Jia, Wenzhi Xiao, Ruofan Ding, Xingyan Bin, Hui Yang, Xiaobing Liu
arXiv:2007.07203 · cs.IR, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jul 12, 2020 · updated May 18, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 6 figures

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