Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent for Extreme-Scale Recommender Systems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recommender systems are influential for many internet applications. As the size of the dataset provided for a recommendation model grows rapidly, how to utilize such amount of data effectively matters a lot. For a typical Click-Through-Rate(CTR) prediction model, the amount of daily samples can probably be up to hundreds of terabytes, which reaches dozens of petabytes at an extreme-scale when we take several days into consideration. Such data makes it essential to train the model parallelly and continuously. Traditional asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) and its variants are proved efficient but often suffer from stale gradients. Hence, the model convergence tends to be worse as more workers are used. Moreover, the existing adaptive optimizers, which are friendly to sparse data, stagger in long-term training due to the significant imbalance between new and accumulated gradients. To address the challenges posed by extreme-scale data, we propose: 1) Staleness normalization and data normalization to eliminate the turbulence of stale gradients when training asynchronously in hundreds and thousands of workers; 2) SWAP, a novel framework for adaptive optimizers to balance the new and historical gradients by taking sampling period into consideration. We implement these approaches in TensorFlow and apply them to CTR tasks in real-world e- commerce scenarios. Experiments show that the number of workers in asynchronous training can be extended to 3000 with guaranteed convergence, and the final AUC is improved by more than 5 percentage.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it