Model Size Reduction Using Frequency Based Double Hashing for Recommender Systems

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with sparse input features have been widely used in recommender systems in industry. These models have large memory requirements and need a huge amount of training data. The large model size usually entails a cost, in the range of millions of dollars, for storage and communication with the inference services. In this paper, we propose a hybrid hashing method to combine frequency hashing and double hashing techniques for model size reduction, without compromising performance. We evaluate the proposed models on two product surfaces. In both cases, experiment results demonstrated that we can reduce the model size by around 90 % while keeping the performance on par with the original baselines.

Learning Selfie-Friendly Abstraction from Artistic Style Images

Artistic style transfer can be thought as a process to generate different versions of abstraction of the original image. However, most of the artistic style transfer operators are not optimized for human faces thus mainly suffers from two undesirable features when applying them to selfies. First, the edges of human faces may unpleasantly deviate from the ones in the original image. Second, the skin color is far from faithful to the original one which is usually problematic in producing quality selfies. In this paper, we take a different approach and formulate this abstraction process as a gradient domain learning problem. We aim to learn a type of abstraction which not only achieves the specified artistic style but also circumvents the two aforementioned drawbacks thus highly applicable to selfie photography. We also show that our method can be directly generalized to videos with high inter-frame consistency. Our method is also robust to non-selfie images, and the generalization to various kinds of real-life scenes is discussed. We will make our code publicly available.