Abstract:Notification recommendation systems are critical to driving user engagement on professional platforms like LinkedIn. Designing such systems involves integrating heterogeneous signals across domains, capturing temporal dynamics, and optimizing for multiple, often competing, objectives. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a powerful framework for modeling complex interactions in such environments. In this paper, we present a cross-domain GNN-based system deployed at LinkedIn that unifies user, content, and activity signals into a single, large-scale graph. By training on this cross-domain structure, our model significantly outperforms single-domain baselines on key tasks, including click-through rate (CTR) prediction and professional engagement. We introduce architectural innovations including temporal modeling and multi-task learning, which further enhance performance. Deployed in LinkedIn's notification system, our approach led to a 0.10% lift in weekly active users and a 0.62% improvement in CTR. We detail our graph construction process, model design, training pipeline, and both offline and online evaluations. Our work demonstrates the scalability and effectiveness of cross-domain GNNs in real-world, high-impact applications.
Abstract:In this paper, we present LiGNN, a deployed large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Framework. We share our insight on developing and deployment of GNNs at large scale at LinkedIn. We present a set of algorithmic improvements to the quality of GNN representation learning including temporal graph architectures with long term losses, effective cold start solutions via graph densification, ID embeddings and multi-hop neighbor sampling. We explain how we built and sped up by 7x our large-scale training on LinkedIn graphs with adaptive sampling of neighbors, grouping and slicing of training data batches, specialized shared-memory queue and local gradient optimization. We summarize our deployment lessons and learnings gathered from A/B test experiments. The techniques presented in this work have contributed to an approximate relative improvements of 1% of Job application hearing back rate, 2% Ads CTR lift, 0.5% of Feed engaged daily active users, 0.2% session lift and 0.1% weekly active user lift from people recommendation. We believe that this work can provide practical solutions and insights for engineers who are interested in applying Graph neural networks at large scale.