Jie Yang

Jie Amy Yang, Jianyu Huang, Jongsoo Park et al.

In recommendation systems, practitioners observed that increase in the number of embedding tables and their sizes often leads to significant improvement in model performances. Given this and the business importance of these models to major internet companies, embedding tables for personalization tasks have grown to terabyte scale and continue to grow at a significant rate. Meanwhile, these large-scale models are often trained with GPUs where high-performance memory is a scarce resource, thus motivating numerous work on embedding table compression during training. We propose a novel change to embedding tables using a cache memory architecture, where the majority of rows in an embedding is trained in low precision, and the most frequently or recently accessed rows cached and trained in full precision. The proposed architectural change works in conjunction with standard precision reduction and computer arithmetic techniques such as quantization and stochastic rounding. For an open source deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) running with Criteo-Kaggle dataset, we achieve 3x memory reduction with INT8 precision embedding tables and full-precision cache whose size are 5% of the embedding tables, while maintaining accuracy. For an industrial scale model and dataset, we achieve even higher >7x memory reduction with INT4 precision and cache size 1% of embedding tables, while maintaining accuracy, and 16% end-to-end training speedup by reducing GPU-to-host data transfers.

Zhenyuan Zhong, Jie Yang, Yacong Ma et al.

The challenge of solving data mining problems in e-commerce applications such as recommendation system (RS) and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is how to make inferences by constructing combinatorial features from a large number of categorical features while preserving the interpretability of the method. In this paper, we propose Automatic Embedded Feature Engineering(AEFE), an automatic feature engineering framework for representing categorical features, which consists of various components including custom paradigm feature construction and multiple feature selection. By selecting the potential field pairs intelligently and generating a series of interpretable combinatorial features, our framework can provide a set of unseen generated features for enhancing model performance and then assist data analysts in discovering the feature importance for particular data mining tasks. Furthermore, AEFE is distributed implemented by task-parallelism, data sampling, and searching schema based on Matrix Factorization field combination, to optimize the performance and enhance the efficiency and scalability of the framework. Experiments conducted on some typical e-commerce datasets indicate that our method outperforms the classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art deep learning models.