AutoEmb: Automated Embedding Dimensionality Search in Streaming Recommendations

Abstract: Deep learning based recommender systems (DLRSs) often have embedding layers, which are utilized to lessen the dimensionality of categorical variables (e.g. user/item identifiers) and meaningfully transform them in the low-dimensional space. The majority of existing DLRSs empirically pre-define a fixed and unified dimension for all user/item embeddings. It is evident from recent researches that different embedding sizes are highly desired for different users/items according to their popularity. However, manually selecting embedding sizes in recommender systems can be very challenging due to the large number of users/items and the dynamic nature of their popularity. Thus, in this paper, we propose an AutoML based end-to-end framework (AutoEmb), which can enable various embedding dimensions according to the popularity in an automated and dynamic manner. To be specific, we first enhance a typical DLRS to allow various embedding dimensions; then we propose an end-to-end differentiable framework that can automatically select different embedding dimensions according to user/item popularity; finally we propose an AutoML based optimization algorithm in a streaming recommendation setting. The experimental results based on widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the AutoEmb framework.