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Building and Deploying a Multi-Stage Recommender System with Merlin

Published: 13 September 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Newcomers to recommender systems often face challenges related to their lack of understanding of how these systems operate in real life. In most online content related to this topic, the focus is on models and algorithms that score items based on the user’s preferences. However, the recommender model alone does not comprise everything needed for serving optimized recommender systems that meet the company’s business objectives. An industry-standard recommender system involves a number of steps, including data preprocessing, defining and training recommender models, as well as filtering and business logic for serving. In this work, we propose the four-stage recommender system, an industry-wide design pattern we have identified for production recommender systems. The four-stage pipeline includes an item retrieval step that prepares a small subset of relevant items for scoring. The filtering stage then cleans up the subset of items based on business logic such as removing out-of-stock or previously seen items. As for the ranking component, it uses a recommender model to score each item in the presented list based on the preferences of the user. In the final step, the scores are re-ordered to provide a final recommendation list aligned with other business needs or constraints such as diversity. In particular, the presented demo demonstrates how easy it is to build and deploy a four-stage recommender system pipeline using the NVIDIA Merlin open-source framework.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (recsys22-demo-recording.mp4)
Presentation of the demo "Building and Deploying a Multi-Stage Recommender System with Merlin", presented at RecSys'22.

References

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Ivan Medvedev, Haotian Wu, and Taylor Gordon. 2019. Powered by AI: Instagram’s Explore recommender system. Retrieved June 17, 2022 from https://instagram-engineering.com/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explore-recommender-system-7ca901d2a882
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Maxim Naumov, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Hao-Jun Michael Shi, Jianyu Huang, Narayanan Sundaraman, Jongsoo Park, Xiaodong Wang, Udit Gupta, Carole-Jean Wu, Alisson G Azzolini, 2019. Deep learning recommendation model for personalization and recommendation systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00091(2019).
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Eugene Yan. 2021. System Design for Recommendations and Search. Retrieved June 17, 2022 from https://eugeneyan.com/writing/system-design-for-discovery/
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Cited By

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  • (2024)On the Analysis of Two-Stage Stochastic BanditProceedings of the Twenty-fifth International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3641512.3686360(51-60)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2024)On Interpretability of Linear AutoencodersProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3640457.3688179(975-980)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Scalable Deep Q-Learning for Session-Based Slate RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3608843(877-882)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023
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RecSys '22: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
September 2022
743 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 13 September 2022

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View all
  • (2024)On the Analysis of Two-Stage Stochastic BanditProceedings of the Twenty-fifth International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3641512.3686360(51-60)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2024)On Interpretability of Linear AutoencodersProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3640457.3688179(975-980)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Scalable Deep Q-Learning for Session-Based Slate RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3608843(877-882)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023
  • (2023)EvalRS 2023: Well-Rounded Recommender Systems for Real-World DeploymentsProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599222(5851-5852)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Scalable and Explainable Linear Shallow Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering from Industrial PerspectiveProceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3565472.3595630(290-295)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023

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