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On the Embedding Collapse when Scaling up Recommendation Models

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arxiv 2310.04400 v2 pith:5XAWQHPF submitted 2023-10-06 cs.LG cs.IR

classification cs.LGcs.IR
keywords modelscollapseembeddingrecommendationscalabilityinteractionanalysisavailable
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Recent advances in foundation models have led to a promising trend of developing large recommendation models to leverage vast amounts of available data. Still, mainstream models remain embarrassingly small in size and na\"ive enlarging does not lead to sufficient performance gain, suggesting a deficiency in the model scalability. In this paper, we identify the embedding collapse phenomenon as the inhibition of scalability, wherein the embedding matrix tends to occupy a low-dimensional subspace. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate a \emph{two-sided effect} of feature interaction specific to recommendation models. On the one hand, interacting with collapsed embeddings restricts embedding learning and exacerbates the collapse issue. On the other hand, interaction is crucial in mitigating the fitting of spurious features as a scalability guarantee. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple yet effective multi-embedding design incorporating embedding-set-specific interaction modules to learn embedding sets with large diversity and thus reduce collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this proposed design provides consistent scalability and effective collapse mitigation for various recommendation models. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Multi-Embedding.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    Generative pretraining plus sparse-embedding freezing makes large Transformer ranking models scale consistently, following a power law from 13K to 0.3B dense parameters.

  3. SpecFormer: Mitigating Embedding and Attention Collapse via Spectral-Aware Transformer for Recommendation

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    SpecFormer is a spectral-aware Transformer that flattens the singular-value spectrum of embeddings to prevent embedding/attention collapse, outperforming baselines on CTR benchmarks and scaling with layer depth.

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    FuXi-β shows that removing query-key attention and using a functional relative time bias makes generative recommendation Transformers faster and, on industrial datasets, more accurate.

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