Learning Two-Time-Scale Representations For Large Scale Recommendations

Xinshi Chen, Yan Zhu, Haowen Xu, Muhan Zhang, Liang Xiong, Le Song

Keywords: Recommendation System, Large-scale Recommendation, User Behavior Modeling, Long-range sequences

Abstract: We propose a surprisingly simple but effective two-time-scale (2TS) model for learning user representations for recommendation. In our approach, we will partition users into two sets, active users with many observed interactions and inactive or new users with few observed interactions, and we will use two RNNs to model them separately. Furthermore, we design a two-stage training method for our model, where, in the first stage, we learn transductive embeddings for users and items, and then, in the second stage, we learn the two RNNs leveraging the transductive embeddings trained in the first stage. Through the lens of online learning and stochastic optimization, we provide theoretical analysis that motivates the design of our 2TS model. The 2TS model achieves a nice bias-variance trade-off while being computationally efficient. In large scale datasets, our 2TS model is able to achieve significantly better recommendations than previous state-of-the-art, yet being much more computationally efficient.

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