Large-Scale Graph Building in Dynamic Environments: Low Latency and High Quality

TL;DR

This paper introduces Dynamic GUS, a system that extends the Grale graph construction tool to dynamic environments, achieving low latency and high quality in continuously evolving datasets, with practical applications at Google.

Contribution

It presents Dynamic GUS, a novel system combining Grale's quality with low-latency dynamic graph updates using ScaNN, suitable for real-time applications.

Findings

Achieves tens of milliseconds latency per request.

Enables faster detection of harmful applications in Android security.

Deployed in over 10 Google applications.

Abstract

Learning and constructing large-scale graphs has attracted attention in recent decades, resulting in a rich literature that introduced various systems, tools, and algorithms. Grale is one of such tools that is designed for offline environments and is deployed in more than 50 different industrial settings at Google. Grale is widely applicable because of its ability to efficiently learn and construct a graph on datasets with multiple types of features. However, it is often the case that applications require the underlying data to evolve continuously and rapidly and the updated graph needs to be available with low latency. Such setting make the use of Grale prohibitive. While there are Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) systems that handle dynamic updates with low latency, they are mostly limited to similarities over a single embedding. In this work, we introduce a system that inherits the advantages and the quality of Grale, and maintains a graph construction in a dynamic setting with tens of milliseconds of latency per request. We call the system Dynamic Grale Using ScaNN (Dynamic GUS). Our system has a wide range of applications with over 10 deployments at Google. One of the applications is in Android Security and Privacy, where Dynamic Grale Using ScaNN enables capturing harmful applications 4 times faster, before they can reach users.