论文标题
向后学习兼容的嵌入
Learning Backward Compatible Embeddings
论文作者
论文摘要
对象的嵌入,低维矢量表示,在构建现代机器学习系统中至关重要。在工业环境中,通常有一个嵌入式团队训练嵌入模型来解决预期的任务(例如,产品建议)。然后,消费者团队广泛消耗了生产的嵌入,以解决他们的意外任务(例如,欺诈检测)。但是,随着嵌入模型被更新和重新训练以提高预期任务的性能,新生成的嵌入不再与现有的消费者模型兼容。这意味着嵌入的历史版本永远无法退休,或者所有消费者团队都必须重新训练其模型,以使其与最新版本的嵌入式兼容,这在实践中都是非常昂贵的。在这里,我们研究了嵌入版本更新及其向后兼容性的问题。我们正式化了嵌入团队继续更新嵌入式版本的目标,而消费者团队不必重新训练他们的模型。我们开发了一种基于向后兼容的嵌入式学习的解决方案,该解决方案允许嵌入模型版本经常更新,同时还允许最新版本的嵌入式版本可以快速转化为IT的任何向后兼容的历史版本,以便消费者团队不必重新训练他们的模型。在我们的框架下,我们探讨了六种方法,并在现实世界中的推荐系统应用程序上系统地对其进行了系统的评估。我们表明,即使在多个模型版本更新之后,我们称为BC-Aligner的最佳方法也可以与现有意外任务保持向后兼容性。同时,BC-Aligner实现了与仅针对预期任务进行优化的嵌入模型相似的预期任务性能。
Embeddings, low-dimensional vector representation of objects, are fundamental in building modern machine learning systems. In industrial settings, there is usually an embedding team that trains an embedding model to solve intended tasks (e.g., product recommendation). The produced embeddings are then widely consumed by consumer teams to solve their unintended tasks (e.g., fraud detection). However, as the embedding model gets updated and retrained to improve performance on the intended task, the newly-generated embeddings are no longer compatible with the existing consumer models. This means that historical versions of the embeddings can never be retired or all consumer teams have to retrain their models to make them compatible with the latest version of the embeddings, both of which are extremely costly in practice. Here we study the problem of embedding version updates and their backward compatibility. We formalize the problem where the goal is for the embedding team to keep updating the embedding version, while the consumer teams do not have to retrain their models. We develop a solution based on learning backward compatible embeddings, which allows the embedding model version to be updated frequently, while also allowing the latest version of the embedding to be quickly transformed into any backward compatible historical version of it, so that consumer teams do not have to retrain their models. Under our framework, we explore six methods and systematically evaluate them on a real-world recommender system application. We show that the best method, which we call BC-Aligner, maintains backward compatibility with existing unintended tasks even after multiple model version updates. Simultaneously, BC-Aligner achieves the intended task performance similar to the embedding model that is solely optimized for the intended task.