Coarse-to-fine lightweight meta-embedding for ID-based recommendations

Yang Wang, Haipeng Liu, Zeqian Yi, Biao Qian, Meng Wang

Abstract: State-of-the-art recommender systems are increasingly focused on optimizing implementation efficiency, such as enabling on-device recommendations under memory constraints. Current methods commonly use lightweight embeddings for users and items or employ compact embeddings to enhance reusability and reduce memory usage. However, these approaches consider only the coarse-grained aspects of embeddings, overlooking subtle semantic nuances. This limitation results in an adversarial degradation of meta-embedding performance, impeding the system’s ability to capture intricate relationships between users and items, leading to suboptimal recommendations. To address this, we propose a novel approach to efficiently learn meta-embeddings with varying grained and apply fine-grained meta-embeddings to strengthen the representation of their coarse-grained counterparts. Specifically, we introduce a recommender system based on a graph neural network, where each user and item is represented as a node. These nodes are directly connected to coarse-grained virtual nodes and indirectly linked to fine-grained virtual nodes, facilitating learning of multi-grained semantics. Fine-grained semantics are captured through sparse meta-embeddings, which dynamically balance embedding uniqueness and memory constraints. To ensure their sparseness, we rely on initialization methods such as sparse principal component analysis combined with a soft thresholding activation function. Moreover, we propose a weight-bridging update strategy that aligns coarse-grained meta-embedding with several fine-grained meta-embeddings based on the underlying semantic properties of users and items. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines. The code of our proposal is available at https://github.com/htyjers/C2F-MetaEmbed.