FuXi-$\alpha$: Scaling Recommendation Model with Feature Interaction Enhanced Transformer

TL;DR

FuXi-$\alpha$ is a novel recommendation model that enhances feature interaction modeling through adaptive multi-channel self-attention and multi-stage FFNs, leading to improved performance in large-scale recommendation tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces FuXi-$\alpha$, a new recommendation model that explicitly models temporal, positional, and semantic features, and enhances implicit interactions, outperforming existing models.

Findings

Outperforms existing models in offline experiments.

Performance improves with larger model size.

Achieves significant online engagement increases in Huawei Music app.

Abstract

Inspired by scaling laws and large language models, research on large-scale recommendation models has gained significant attention. Recent advancements have shown that expanding sequential recommendation models to large-scale recommendation models can be an effective strategy. Current state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models primarily use self-attention mechanisms for explicit feature interactions among items, while implicit interactions are managed through Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs). However, these models often inadequately integrate temporal and positional information, either by adding them to attention weights or by blending them with latent representations, which limits their expressive power. A recent model, HSTU, further reduces the focus on implicit feature interactions, constraining its performance. We propose a new model called FuXi-$\alpha$ to address these issues. This model introduces an Adaptive Multi-channel Self-attention mechanism that distinctly models temporal, positional, and semantic features, along with a Multi-stage FFN to enhance implicit feature interactions. Our offline experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms existing models, with its performance continuously improving as the model size increases. Additionally, we conducted an online A/B test within the Huawei Music app, which showed a $4.76\%$ increase in the average number of songs played per user and a $5.10\%$ increase in the average listening duration per user. Our code has been released at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/FuXi-alpha.