Large scale recommender models find most relevant items from huge catalogs, and they play a critical role in modern search and recommendation systems. To model the input space with large-vocab categorical features, a typical recommender model learns a joint embedding space through neural networks for both queries and items from user feedback data. However, with millions to billions of items, the power-law user feedback makes labels very sparse for a large amount of long-tail items. Inspired by the recent success in self-supervised representation learning research in both computer vision and natural language understanding, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for large-scale item recommendations. The framework is designed to tackle the label sparsity problem by learning more robust item representations. Furthermore, we propose two self-supervised tasks applicable to models with categorical features within the proposed framework: (i) Feature Masking (FM) and (ii) Feature Dropout (FD). We evaluate our framework using two large-scale datasets with 500M and 1B training examples respectively. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms traditional supervised learning only models and state-of-the-art regularization techniques in the context of item recommendations. The SSL framework shows larger improvement with less supervision compared to the counterparts. We also apply the proposed techniques to a web-scale commercial app-to-app recommendation system, and significantly improve top-tier business metrics via A/B experiments on live traffic. Our online results also verify our hypothesis that our framework indeed improves model performance on slices that lack supervision.

We present a theoretically grounded approach to train deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, subject to class-dependent label noise. We propose two procedures for loss correction that are agnostic to both application domain and network architecture. They simply amount to at most a matrix inversion and multiplication, provided that we know the probability of each class being corrupted into another. We further show how one can estimate these probabilities, adapting a recent technique for noise estimation to the multi-class setting, and thus providing an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on MNIST, IMDB, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and a large scale dataset of clothing images employing a diversity of architectures --- stacking dense, convolutional, pooling, dropout, batch normalization, word embedding, LSTM and residual layers --- demonstrate the noise robustness of our proposals. Incidentally, we also prove that, when ReLU is the only non-linearity, the loss curvature is immune to class-dependent label noise.

Bregman divergences play a central role in the design and analysis of a range of machine learning algorithms through a handful of popular theorems. We present a new theorem which shows that ``Bregman distortions'' (employing a potentially non-convex generator) may be exactly re-written as a scaled Bregman divergence computed over transformed data. This property can be viewed from the standpoints of geometry (a scaled isometry with adaptive metrics) or convex optimization (relating generalized perspective transforms). Admissible distortions include {geodesic distances} on curved manifolds and projections or gauge-normalisation. Our theorem allows one to leverage to the wealth and convenience of Bregman divergences when analysing algorithms relying on the aforementioned Bregman distortions. We illustrate this with three novel applications of our theorem: a reduction from multi-class density ratio to class-probability estimation, a new adaptive projection free yet norm-enforcing dual norm mirror descent algorithm, and a reduction from clustering on flat manifolds to clustering on curved manifolds. Experiments on each of these domains validate the analyses and suggest that the scaled Bregman theorem might be a worthy addition to the popular handful of Bregman divergence properties that have been pervasive in machine learning.

Convex potential minimisation is the de facto approach to binary classification. However, Long and Servedio [2008] proved that under symmetric label noise (SLN), minimisation of any convex potential over a linear function class can result in classification performance equivalent to random guessing. This ostensibly shows that convex losses are not SLN-robust. In this paper, we propose a convex, classification-calibrated loss and prove that it is SLN-robust. The loss avoids the Long and Servedio [2008] result by virtue of being negatively unbounded. The loss is a modification of the hinge loss, where one does not clamp at zero; hence, we call it the unhinged loss. We show that the optimal unhinged solution is equivalent to that of a strongly regularised SVM, and is the limiting solution for any convex potential; this implies that strong l2 regularisation makes most standard learners SLN-robust. Experiments confirm the unhinged loss’ SLN-robustness.

In many real-world applications of machine learning classifiers, it is essential to predict the probability of an example belonging to a particular class. This paper proposes a simple technique for predicting probabilities based on optimizing a ranking loss, followed by isotonic regression. This semi-parametric technique offers both good ranking and regression performance, and models a richer set of probability distributions than statistical workhorses such as logistic regression. We provide experimental results that show the effectiveness of this technique on real-world applications of probability prediction.