RankMixer: Scaling Up Ranking Models in Industrial Recommenders

TL;DR

RankMixer is a scalable, hardware-aware ranking model architecture that significantly improves efficiency and scalability for industrial recommender systems, enabling billion-parameter models without increasing latency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel GPU-efficient feature-interaction architecture with a multi-head token mixing module and extends to billion-parameter models with Sparse-MoE, demonstrating superior scaling and efficiency.

Findings

Boosts model MFU from 4.5% to 45%.

Scales parameters by 100x with similar latency.

Improves user engagement metrics in online tests.

Abstract

Recent progress on large language models (LLMs) has spurred interest in scaling up recommendation systems, yet two practical obstacles remain. First, training and serving cost on industrial Recommenders must respect strict latency bounds and high QPS demands. Second, most human-designed feature-crossing modules in ranking models were inherited from the CPU era and fail to exploit modern GPUs, resulting in low Model Flops Utilization (MFU) and poor scalability. We introduce RankMixer, a hardware-aware model design tailored towards a unified and scalable feature-interaction architecture. RankMixer retains the transformer's high parallelism while replacing quadratic self-attention with multi-head token mixing module for higher efficiency. Besides, RankMixer maintains both the modeling for distinct feature subspaces and cross-feature-space interactions with Per-token FFNs. We further extend it to one billion parameters with a Sparse-MoE variant for higher ROI. A dynamic routing strategy is adapted to address the inadequacy and imbalance of experts training. Experiments show RankMixer's superior scaling abilities on a trillion-scale production dataset. By replacing previously diverse handcrafted low-MFU modules with RankMixer, we boost the model MFU from 4.5\% to 45\%, and scale our ranking model parameters by 100x while maintaining roughly the same inference latency. We verify RankMixer's universality with online A/B tests across two core application scenarios (Recommendation and Advertisement). Finally, we launch 1B Dense-Parameters RankMixer for full traffic serving without increasing the serving cost, which improves user active days by 0.3\% and total in-app usage duration by 1.08\%.