Salvato in:
| Autori principali: | , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09331 |
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Sommario:
- Two-tower neural networks are a popular architecture for the retrieval stage in recommender systems. These models are typically trained with a softmax loss over the item catalog. However, in web-scale settings, the item catalog is often prohibitively large, making full softmax infeasible. A common solution is sampled softmax, which approximates the full softmax using a small number of sampled negatives. One practical and widely adopted approach is to use in-batch negatives, where negatives are drawn from items in the current mini-batch. However, this introduces a bias: items that appear more frequently in the batch (i.e., popular items) are penalized more heavily. To mitigate this issue, a popular industry technique known as logQ correction adjusts the logits during training by subtracting the log-probability of an item appearing in the batch. This correction is derived by analyzing the bias in the gradient and applying importance sampling, effectively twice, using the in-batch distribution as a proposal distribution. While this approach improves model quality, it does not fully eliminate the bias. In this work, we revisit the derivation of logQ correction and show that it overlooks a subtle but important detail: the positive item in the denominator is not Monte Carlo-sampled - it is always present with probability 1. We propose a refined correction formula that accounts for this. Notably, our loss introduces an interpretable sample weight that reflects the model's uncertainty - the probability of misclassification under the current parameters. We evaluate our method on both public and proprietary datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements over the standard logQ correction.