Large Memory Network for Recommendation

Modeling user behavior sequences in recommender systems is essential for understanding user preferences over time, enabling personalized and accurate recommendations for improving user retention and enhancing business values. Despite its significance, there are two challenges for current sequential modeling approaches. From the spatial dimension, it is difficult to mutually perceive similar users' interests for a generalized intention understanding; from the temporal dimension, current methods are generally prone to forgetting long-term interests due to the fixed-length input sequence. In this paper, we present Large Memory Network (LMN), providing a novel idea by compressing and storing user history behavior information in a large-scale memory block. With the elaborated online deployment strategy, the memory block can be easily scaled up to million-scale in the industry. Extensive offline comparison experiments, memory scaling up experiments, and online A/B test on Douyin E-Commerce Search (ECS) are performed, validating the superior performance of LMN. Currently, LMN has been fully deployed in Douyin ECS, serving millions of users each day.