Realizing Scaling Laws in Recommender Systems: A Foundation-Expert Paradigm for Hyperscale Model Deployment
This addresses the problem of efficiently scaling recommender systems for large-scale platforms like Meta, offering a compute-efficient and developer-friendly solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of deploying hyperscale models in recommender systems by proposing a Foundation-Expert Paradigm, where a central foundation model transfers knowledge to lightweight expert models, resulting in online metric improvements and serving tens of billions of daily requests at Meta.
While scaling laws promise significant performance gains for recommender systems, efficiently deploying hyperscale models remains a major unsolved challenge. In contrast to fields where FMs are already widely adopted such as natural language processing and computer vision, progress in recommender systems is hindered by unique challenges including the need to learn from online streaming data under shifting data distributions, the need to adapt to different recommendation surfaces with a wide diversity in their downstream tasks and their input distributions, and stringent latency and computational constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose to leverage the Foundation-Expert Paradigm: a framework designed for the development and deployment of hyperscale recommendation FMs. In our approach, a central FM is trained on lifelong, cross-surface, multi-modal user data to learn generalizable knowledge. This knowledge is then efficiently transferred to various lightweight, surface-specific "expert" models via target-aware embeddings, allowing them to adapt to local data distributions and optimization goals with minimal overhead. To meet our training, inference and development needs, we built HyperCast, a production-grade infrastructure system that re-engineers training, serving, logging and iteration to power this decoupled paradigm. Our approach is now deployed at Meta serving tens of billions of user requests daily, demonstrating online metric improvements over our previous one-stage production system while improving developer velocity and maintaining infrastructure efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful deployment of a Foundation-Expert paradigm at this scale, offering a proven, compute-efficient, and developer-friendly blueprint to realize the promise of scaling laws in recommender systems.