Deep Tree-based Retrieval for Efficient Recommendation: Theory and Method

With the development of deep learning techniques, deep recommendation models also achieve remarkable improvements in terms of recommendation accuracy. However, due to the large number of candidate items in practice and the high cost of preference computation, these methods also suffer from low efficiency of recommendation. The recently proposed tree-based deep recommendation models alleviate the problem by directly learning tree structure and representations under the guidance of recommendation objectives. However, such models have shortcomings. The max-heap assumption in the hierarchical tree, in which the preference for a parent node should be the maximum between the preferences for its children, is difficult to satisfy in their binary classification objectives. To this end, we propose Tree-based Deep Retrieval (TDR for short) for efficient recommendation. In TDR, all the trees generated during the training process are retained to form the forest. When learning the node representation of each tree, we have to satisfy the max-heap assumption as much as possible and mimic beam search behavior over the tree in the training stage. This is achieved by TDR to regard the training task as multi-classification over tree nodes at the same level. However, the number of tree nodes grows exponentially with levels, making us train the preference model with the guidance of the sampled-softmax technique. The experiments are conducted on real-world datasets, validating the effectiveness of the proposed preference model learning method and tree learning method.