Retrieval Augmentation via User Interest Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, interest-based clustering approach to improve recommendation accuracy for both light and heavy users by capturing complex user-item interaction patterns efficiently.

Contribution

It proposes an intermediate user-interest layer with clustering and attention mechanisms, enhancing personalization and scalability in industrial recommender systems.

Findings

Improved recommendation performance on public datasets.

Enhanced computational efficiency over item-level attention models.

Successful deployment in Meta's short-form video products.

Abstract

Many existing industrial recommender systems are sensitive to the patterns of user-item engagement. Light users, who interact less frequently, correspond to a data sparsity problem, making it difficult for the system to accurately learn and represent their preferences. On the other hand, heavy users with rich interaction history often demonstrate a variety of niche interests that are hard to be precisely captured under the standard "user-item" similarity measurement. Moreover, implementing these systems in an industrial environment necessitates that they are resource-efficient and scalable to process web-scale data under strict latency constraints. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing an intermediate "interest" layer between users and items. We propose a novel approach that efficiently constructs user interest and facilitates low computational cost inference by clustering engagement graphs and incorporating user-interest attention. This method enhances the understanding of light users' preferences by linking them with heavy users. By integrating user-interest attention, our approach allows a more personalized similarity metric, adept at capturing the complex dynamics of user-item interactions. The use of interest as an intermediary layer fosters a balance between scalability and expressiveness in the model. Evaluations on two public datasets reveal that our method not only achieves improved recommendation performance but also demonstrates enhanced computational efficiency compared to item-level attention models. Our approach has also been deployed in multiple products at Meta, facilitating short-form video related recommendation.