Microsoft Corporation
Assessing Similarity Between Items Using Embeddings Produced Using a Distributed Training Framework

Abstract:

A resource-efficient technique is described for producing and utilizing a set of trained embeddings. With respect to its training phase, the technique receives a group of sparsely-expressed training examples of high dimensionality. The technique processes the training examples using a distributed training framework of computing devices. With respect to its inference stage, the technique draws on the embeddings produced by the training framework. But in one implementation, the inference-stage processing applies a different prediction function than that used by the training framework. One implementation of interference-stage processing involves determining a distance between a query embedding and a candidate item embedding, where each such embedding is obtained or derived from the trained embeddings produced by the training framework. Another manifestation of inference-stage processing involves adjusting click counts based on identified relations among items embeddings.