Product Quantized Collaborative Filtering

Because of strict response-time constraints, efficiency of top-k recommendation is crucial for real-world recommender systems. Locality sensitive hashing and index-based methods usually store both index data and item feature vectors in main memory, so they handle a limited number of items. Hashing-based recommendation methods enjoy low memory cost and fast retrieval of items, but suffer from large accuracy degradation. In this paper, we propose product Quantized Collaborative Filtering (pQCF) for better trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. pQCF decomposes a joint latent space of users and items into a Cartesian product of low-dimensional subspaces, and learns clustered representation within each subspace. A latent factor is then represented by a short code, which is composed of subspace cluster indexes. A user's preference for an item can be efficiently calculated via table lookup. We then develop block coordinate descent for efficient optimization and reveal the learning of latent factors is seamlessly integrated with quantization. We further investigate an asymmetric pQCF, dubbed as QCF, where user latent factors are not quantized and shared across different subspaces. The extensive experiments with 6 real-world datasets show that pQCF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing-based CF and QCF increases recommendation accuracy compared to pQCF.

Automated summary

The paper proposes a new method called product Quantized Collaborative Filtering (pQCF) to achieve a better balance between efficiency and accuracy. By decomposing the latent space into subspaces and learning clustered representations, latent factors can be efficiently represented and user preferences for items can be calculated. Experimental results show that pQCF significantly outperforms hashing-based CF methods.