Scalable Cross-Entropy Loss for Sequential Recommendations with Large Item Catalogs

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Main Authors: Mezentsev, Gleb, Gusak, Danil, Oseledets, Ivan, Frolov, Evgeny
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mezentsev, Gleb
Gusak, Danil
Oseledets, Ivan
Frolov, Evgeny
author_facet Mezentsev, Gleb
Gusak, Danil
Oseledets, Ivan
Frolov, Evgeny
contents Scalability issue plays a crucial role in productionizing modern recommender systems. Even lightweight architectures may suffer from high computational overload due to intermediate calculations, limiting their practicality in real-world applications. Specifically, applying full Cross-Entropy (CE) loss often yields state-of-the-art performance in terms of recommendations quality. Still, it suffers from excessive GPU memory utilization when dealing with large item catalogs. This paper introduces a novel Scalable Cross-Entropy (SCE) loss function in the sequential learning setup. It approximates the CE loss for datasets with large-size catalogs, enhancing both time efficiency and memory usage without compromising recommendations quality. Unlike traditional negative sampling methods, our approach utilizes a selective GPU-efficient computation strategy, focusing on the most informative elements of the catalog, particularly those most likely to be false positives. This is achieved by approximating the softmax distribution over a subset of the model outputs through the maximum inner product search. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCE in reducing peak memory usage by a factor of up to 100 compared to the alternatives, retaining or even exceeding their metrics values. The proposed approach also opens new perspectives for large-scale developments in different domains, such as large language models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_18721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Cross-Entropy Loss for Sequential Recommendations with Large Item Catalogs
Mezentsev, Gleb
Gusak, Danil
Oseledets, Ivan
Frolov, Evgeny
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Scalability issue plays a crucial role in productionizing modern recommender systems. Even lightweight architectures may suffer from high computational overload due to intermediate calculations, limiting their practicality in real-world applications. Specifically, applying full Cross-Entropy (CE) loss often yields state-of-the-art performance in terms of recommendations quality. Still, it suffers from excessive GPU memory utilization when dealing with large item catalogs. This paper introduces a novel Scalable Cross-Entropy (SCE) loss function in the sequential learning setup. It approximates the CE loss for datasets with large-size catalogs, enhancing both time efficiency and memory usage without compromising recommendations quality. Unlike traditional negative sampling methods, our approach utilizes a selective GPU-efficient computation strategy, focusing on the most informative elements of the catalog, particularly those most likely to be false positives. This is achieved by approximating the softmax distribution over a subset of the model outputs through the maximum inner product search. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCE in reducing peak memory usage by a factor of up to 100 compared to the alternatives, retaining or even exceeding their metrics values. The proposed approach also opens new perspectives for large-scale developments in different domains, such as large language models.
title Scalable Cross-Entropy Loss for Sequential Recommendations with Large Item Catalogs
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18721