Siddharth Dangi

Lars Hertel, Gaurav Srivastava, Syed Ali Naqvi et al.

LinkedIn Feed enables professionals worldwide to discover relevant content, build connections, and share knowledge at scale. We present Feed Sequential Recommender (Feed SR), a transformer-based sequential ranking model for LinkedIn Feed that replaces a DCNv2-based ranker and meets strict production constraints. We detail the modeling choices, training techniques, and serving optimizations that enable deployment at a scale of 1.2 billion members. Feed SR has been serving the majority of LinkedIn's Feed traffic for over three months and shows significant improvements in member engagement (+2.10% time spent, +3.52% like, comments, or reshares) in online A/B tests compared to the existing production model. We also describe our deployment experience with alternative sequential and LLM-based ranking architectures and why Feed SR provided the best combination of online metrics and production efficiency.

Fedor Borisyuk, Shihai He, Yunbo Ouyang et al.

In this paper, we present LiGNN, a deployed large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Framework. We share our insight on developing and deployment of GNNs at large scale at LinkedIn. We present a set of algorithmic improvements to the quality of GNN representation learning including temporal graph architectures with long term losses, effective cold start solutions via graph densification, ID embeddings and multi-hop neighbor sampling. We explain how we built and sped up by 7x our large-scale training on LinkedIn graphs with adaptive sampling of neighbors, grouping and slicing of training data batches, specialized shared-memory queue and local gradient optimization. We summarize our deployment lessons and learnings gathered from A/B test experiments. The techniques presented in this work have contributed to an approximate relative improvements of 1% of Job application hearing back rate, 2% Ads CTR lift, 0.5% of Feed engaged daily active users, 0.2% session lift and 0.1% weekly active user lift from people recommendation. We believe that this work can provide practical solutions and insights for engineers who are interested in applying Graph neural networks at large scale.

Fedor Borisyuk, Mingzhou Zhou, Qingquan Song et al.

We present LiRank, a large-scale ranking framework at LinkedIn that brings to production state-of-the-art modeling architectures and optimization methods. We unveil several modeling improvements, including Residual DCN, which adds attention and residual connections to the famous DCNv2 architecture. We share insights into combining and tuning SOTA architectures to create a unified model, including Dense Gating, Transformers and Residual DCN. We also propose novel techniques for calibration and describe how we productionalized deep learning based explore/exploit methods. To enable effective, production-grade serving of large ranking models, we detail how to train and compress models using quantization and vocabulary compression. We provide details about the deployment setup for large-scale use cases of Feed ranking, Jobs Recommendations, and Ads click-through rate (CTR) prediction. We summarize our learnings from various A/B tests by elucidating the most effective technical approaches. These ideas have contributed to relative metrics improvements across the board at LinkedIn: +0.5% member sessions in the Feed, +1.76% qualified job applications for Jobs search and recommendations, and +4.3% for Ads CTR. We hope this work can provide practical insights and solutions for practitioners interested in leveraging large-scale deep ranking systems.

Sudarshan Srinivasa Ramanujam, Akanksha Bindal, Yu Jiang et al.

A post embedding (representation of text in embedding space that effectively captures semantic meaning) is a foundational component of LinkedIn that is consumed by product surfaces in retrieval and ranking (e.g., ranking posts in the feed or video tab). This paper presents the post embeddings used at LinkedIn, where a pre-trained transformer-based large language model (LLM) is taken as input and fine-tuned using multi-task learning across a diverse set of semantic labeling tasks. We observe positive transfer, leading to improved performance across all tasks, compared to training them independently. The generated post embeddings outperform baseline models in zero-shot learning, demonstrating its potential for broader applicability. Furthermore, the generated post embeddings' performance surpasses that of OpenAI's ADA-001 and ADA-002 embeddings on LinkedIn specific datasets and tasks. We also describe the offline evaluation methodology and the deployment to our near-line infrastructure, which makes the post embedding available for use within minutes of post creation for any downstream application. We present how the embeddings were applied in the Feed product surface, in both ranking and retrieval stages, and showcase the real world online impact to demonstrate the superior performance of these embeddings. Finally, we also share the results of applying the embeddings to the retrieval system of our video ranking product surface in LinkedIn. These embeddings have been battle-tested in production at LinkedIn for over two years, consistently powering multiple products.

Sudarshan Srinivasa Ramanujam, Antonio Alonso, Saurabh Kataria et al.

In large scale recommendation systems like the LinkedIn Feed, the retrieval stage is critical for narrowing hundreds of millions of potential candidates to a manageable subset for ranking. LinkedIn's Feed serves suggested content from outside of the member's network (based on the member's topical interests), where 2000 candidates are retrieved from a pool of hundreds of millions candidate with a latency budget of a few milliseconds and inbound QPS of several thousand per second. This paper presents a novel retrieval approach that fine-tunes a large causal language model (Meta's LLaMA 3) as a dual encoder to generate high quality embeddings for both users (members) and content (items), using only textual input. We describe the end to end pipeline, including prompt design for embedding generation, techniques for fine-tuning at LinkedIn's scale, and infrastructure for low latency, cost effective online serving. We share our findings on how quantizing numerical features in the prompt enables the information to get properly encoded in the embedding, facilitating greater alignment between the retrieval and ranking layer. The system was evaluated using offline metrics and an online A/B test, which showed substantial improvements in member engagement. We observed significant gains among newer members, who often lack strong network connections, indicating that high-quality suggested content aids retention. This work demonstrates how generative language models can be effectively adapted for real time, high throughput retrieval in industrial applications.