AutoMARS: Searching to Compress Multi-Modality Recommendation Systems

Web applications utilize Recommendation Systems (RS) to address the problem of consumer over-choices. Recent works have taken advantage of multi-modality or multi-view, input information (such as user interaction, images, texts, rating scores) to boost recommendation system performance compared with using single-modality information. However, the use of multi-modality input demands much higher computational cost and storage capacity. On the other hand, the real-world RS services usually have strict budgets on both time and space for a good customer experience. As a result, the model efficiency of multi-modality recommendation systems has gained increasing importance. While unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing study of a generic compression framework for multi-modality RS. In this paper, we investigate, for the first time, how to compress a multi-modality recommendation system with a fixed budget. Assuming that input information from different modalities are of unequal importance, a good compression algorithm should learn to automatically allocate different resource budgets to each input, based on their importance in maximally preserving recommendation efficacy. To this end, we leverage the tools of neural architecture search (NAS) and distillation and propose Auto Multi-modAlity Recommendation System (AutoMARS), a unified modality-aware model compression framework dedicated to multi-modality recommendation systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of AutoMARS by testing it on three different Amazon datasets of various sparsity. AutoMARS demonstrates superior multi-modality compression performance than previous state-of-the-art compression methods. For example on the Amazon Beauty dataset, we achieve on average a 20% higher accuracy over previous state-of-the-art methods, while enjoying 65% reduction over baselines. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/AutoMARS.