Low Rank Field-Weighted Factorization Machines for Low Latency Item Recommendation

Factorization machine (FM) variants are widely used in recommendation systems that operate under strict throughput and latency requirements, such as online advertising systems. FMs have two prominent strengths. First, is their ability to model pairwise feature interactions while being resilient to data sparsity by learning factorized representations. Second, their computational graphs facilitate fast inference and training. Moreover, when items are ranked as a part of a query for each incoming user, these graphs facilitate computing the portion stemming from the user and context fields only once per query. Thus, the computational cost for each ranked item is proportional only to the number of fields that vary among the ranked items. Consequently, in terms of inference cost, the number of user or context fields is practically unlimited.