On Component Interactions in Two-Stage Recommender Systems

Jiri Hron, Karl Krauth, Michael Jordan, Niki Kilbertus

Keywords: recommender systems, mixture of experts, bandits, scalability

Abstract: Thanks to their scalability, two-stage recommenders are used by many of today's largest online platforms, including YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. These systems produce recommendations in two steps: (i) multiple nominators—tuned for low prediction latency—preselect a small subset of candidates from the whole item pool; (ii) a slower but more accurate ranker further narrows down the nominated items, and serves to the user. Despite their popularity, the literature on two-stage recommenders is relatively scarce, and the algorithms are often treated as mere sums of their parts. Such treatment presupposes that the two-stage performance is explained by the behavior of the individual components in isolation. This is not the case: using synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate that interactions between the ranker and the nominators substantially affect the overall performance. Motivated by these findings, we derive a generalization lower bound which shows that independent nominator training can lead to performance on par with uniformly random recommendations. We find that careful design of item pools, each assigned to a different nominator, alleviates these issues. As manual search for a good pool allocation is difficult, we propose to learn one instead using a Mixture-of-Experts based approach. This significantly improves both precision and recall at $K$.

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TL;DR: Candidate generators in two-stage systems can be viewed as experts for their item subset, and thus trained jointly using Mixture-of-Experts algorithms.

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2106.14979/code)