AMEIR: Automatic Behavior Modeling, Interaction Exploration and MLP Investigation in the Recommender System

Abstract

Recently, deep learning models have been widely explored in recommender systems. Though having achieved remarkable success, the design of task-aware recommendation models usually requires manual feature engineering and architecture engineering from domain experts. To relieve those efforts, we explore the potential of neural architecture search (NAS) and introduce AMEIR for Automatic behavior Modeling, interaction Exploration and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) Investigation in the Recommender system. Specifically, AMEIR divides the complete recommendation models into three stages of behavior modeling, interaction exploration, MLP aggregation, and introduces a novel search space containing three tailored subspaces that cover most of the existing methods and thus allow for searching better models. To find the ideal architecture efficiently and effectively, AMEIR realizes the one-shot random search in recommendation progressively on the three stages and assembles the search results as the final outcome. The experiment over various scenarios reveals that AMEIR outperforms competitive baselines of elaborate manual design and leading algorithmic complex NAS methods with lower model complexity and comparable time cost, indicating efficacy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method.