MultiBalance: Multi-Objective Gradient Balancing in Industrial-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation System

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Yun, Chen, Xuxing, Xu, Jiayi, Cai, Renqin, You, Yiling, Cao, Jennifer, Huang, Minhui, Yang, Liu, Liu, Yiqun, Liu, Xiaoyi, Jin, Rong, Park, Sem, Long, Bo, Feng, Xue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author He, Yun
Chen, Xuxing
Xu, Jiayi
Cai, Renqin
You, Yiling
Cao, Jennifer
Huang, Minhui
Yang, Liu
Liu, Yiqun
Liu, Xiaoyi
Jin, Rong
Park, Sem
Long, Bo
Feng, Xue
author_facet He, Yun
Chen, Xuxing
Xu, Jiayi
Cai, Renqin
You, Yiling
Cao, Jennifer
Huang, Minhui
Yang, Liu
Liu, Yiqun
Liu, Xiaoyi
Jin, Rong
Park, Sem
Long, Bo
Feng, Xue
contents In industrial recommendation systems, multi-task learning (learning multiple tasks simultaneously on a single model) is a predominant approach to save training/serving resources and improve recommendation performance via knowledge transfer between the joint learning tasks. However, multi-task learning often suffers from negative transfer: one or several tasks are less optimized than training them separately. To carefully balance the optimization, we propose a gradient balancing approach called MultiBalance, which is suitable for industrial-scale multi-task recommendation systems. It balances the per-task gradients to alleviate the negative transfer, while saving the huge cost for grid search or manual explorations for appropriate task weights. Moreover, compared with prior work that normally balance the per-task gradients of shared parameters, MultiBalance is more efficient since only requiring to access per-task gradients with respect to the shared feature representations. We conduct experiments on Meta's large-scale ads and feeds multi-task recommendation system, and observe that MultiBalance achieves significant gains (e.g., 0.738% improvement for normalized entropy (NE)) with neutral training cost in Queries Per Second (QPS), which is significantly more efficient than prior methods that balance per-task gradients of shared parameters with 70~80% QPS degradation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_11871
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MultiBalance: Multi-Objective Gradient Balancing in Industrial-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation System
He, Yun
Chen, Xuxing
Xu, Jiayi
Cai, Renqin
You, Yiling
Cao, Jennifer
Huang, Minhui
Yang, Liu
Liu, Yiqun
Liu, Xiaoyi
Jin, Rong
Park, Sem
Long, Bo
Feng, Xue
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
In industrial recommendation systems, multi-task learning (learning multiple tasks simultaneously on a single model) is a predominant approach to save training/serving resources and improve recommendation performance via knowledge transfer between the joint learning tasks. However, multi-task learning often suffers from negative transfer: one or several tasks are less optimized than training them separately. To carefully balance the optimization, we propose a gradient balancing approach called MultiBalance, which is suitable for industrial-scale multi-task recommendation systems. It balances the per-task gradients to alleviate the negative transfer, while saving the huge cost for grid search or manual explorations for appropriate task weights. Moreover, compared with prior work that normally balance the per-task gradients of shared parameters, MultiBalance is more efficient since only requiring to access per-task gradients with respect to the shared feature representations. We conduct experiments on Meta's large-scale ads and feeds multi-task recommendation system, and observe that MultiBalance achieves significant gains (e.g., 0.738% improvement for normalized entropy (NE)) with neutral training cost in Queries Per Second (QPS), which is significantly more efficient than prior methods that balance per-task gradients of shared parameters with 70~80% QPS degradation.
title MultiBalance: Multi-Objective Gradient Balancing in Industrial-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation System
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11871