Mixed-Precision Embeddings for Large-Scale Recommendation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Shiwei, Hu, Zhuoqi, Tang, Xing, Wang, Haozhao, Xu, Shijie, Luo, Weihong, Li, Yuhua, He, Xiuqiang, Li, Ruixuan
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Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Li, Shiwei
Hu, Zhuoqi
Tang, Xing
Wang, Haozhao
Xu, Shijie
Luo, Weihong
Li, Yuhua
He, Xiuqiang
Li, Ruixuan
author_facet Li, Shiwei
Hu, Zhuoqi
Tang, Xing
Wang, Haozhao
Xu, Shijie
Luo, Weihong
Li, Yuhua
He, Xiuqiang
Li, Ruixuan
contents Embedding techniques have become essential components of large databases in the deep learning era. By encoding discrete entities, such as words, items, or graph nodes, into continuous vector spaces, embeddings facilitate more efficient storage, retrieval, and processing in large databases. Especially in the domain of recommender systems, millions of categorical features are encoded as unique embedding vectors, which facilitates the modeling of similarities and interactions among features. However, numerous embedding vectors can result in significant storage overhead. In this paper, we aim to compress the embedding table through quantization techniques. Given that features vary in importance levels, we seek to identify an appropriate precision for each feature to balance model accuracy and memory usage. To this end, we propose a novel embedding compression method, termed Mixed-Precision Embeddings (MPE). Specifically, to reduce the size of the search space, we first group features by frequency and then search precision for each feature group. MPE further learns the probability distribution over precision levels for each feature group, which can be used to identify the most suitable precision with a specially designed sampling strategy. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that MPE significantly outperforms existing embedding compression methods. Remarkably, MPE achieves about 200x compression on the Criteo dataset without comprising the prediction accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_20305
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixed-Precision Embeddings for Large-Scale Recommendation Models
Li, Shiwei
Hu, Zhuoqi
Tang, Xing
Wang, Haozhao
Xu, Shijie
Luo, Weihong
Li, Yuhua
He, Xiuqiang
Li, Ruixuan
Information Retrieval
Databases
Embedding techniques have become essential components of large databases in the deep learning era. By encoding discrete entities, such as words, items, or graph nodes, into continuous vector spaces, embeddings facilitate more efficient storage, retrieval, and processing in large databases. Especially in the domain of recommender systems, millions of categorical features are encoded as unique embedding vectors, which facilitates the modeling of similarities and interactions among features. However, numerous embedding vectors can result in significant storage overhead. In this paper, we aim to compress the embedding table through quantization techniques. Given that features vary in importance levels, we seek to identify an appropriate precision for each feature to balance model accuracy and memory usage. To this end, we propose a novel embedding compression method, termed Mixed-Precision Embeddings (MPE). Specifically, to reduce the size of the search space, we first group features by frequency and then search precision for each feature group. MPE further learns the probability distribution over precision levels for each feature group, which can be used to identify the most suitable precision with a specially designed sampling strategy. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that MPE significantly outperforms existing embedding compression methods. Remarkably, MPE achieves about 200x compression on the Criteo dataset without comprising the prediction accuracy.
title Mixed-Precision Embeddings for Large-Scale Recommendation Models
topic Information Retrieval
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20305