DECAF

Joint work with Anshul Mittal, Kunal Dahiya, Sheshansh Agrawal, Summet Agarwal, Purushottam Kar, Manik Varma

Extreme multi-label classification (XML) involves tagging a data point with its most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set, with several applications such as product-to-product recommendation with millions of products. Although leading XML algorithms scale to millions of labels, they largely ignore label metadata such as textual descriptions of the labels. On the other hand, classical techniques that can utilize label metadata via representation learning using deep networks struggle in extreme settings. This paper develops the DECAF algorithm that addresses these challenges by learning models enriched by label metadata that jointly learn model parameters and feature representations using deep networks and offer accurate classification at the scale of millions of labels. DECAF makes specific contributions to model architecture design, initialization, and training, enabling it to offer up to 2-6% more accurate prediction than leading extreme classifiers on publicly available benchmark product-to-product recommendation datasets, such as LF-AmazonTitles-1.3M. At the same time, DECAF was found to be up to 22x faster at inference than leading deep extreme classifiers, which makes it suitable for real-time applications that require predictions within a few milliseconds.

Please use this Bibtext in case you need to cite the work:

@InProceedings{Mittal21,
    author = "Mittal, A. and Dahiya, K. and Agrawal, S. and Saini, D. and Agarwal, S. and Kar, P. and Varma, M.",
    title = "DECAF: Deep Extreme Classification with Label Features",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining",
    month = "March",
    year = "2021",
    }

Please feel free to tinker with the code.