AutoAssign+: Automatic Shared Embedding Assignment in Streaming
  Recommendation
Ziru Liu Kecheng Chen Fengyi Song Bo Chen Xiangyu Zhao Huifeng Guo Ruiming Tang
In the domain of streaming recommender systems, conventional methods for
addressing new user IDs or item IDs typically involve assigning initial ID
embeddings randomly. However, this practice results in two practical
challenges: (i) Items or users with limited interactive data may yield
suboptimal prediction performance. (ii) Embedding new IDs or low-frequency IDs
necessitates consistently expanding the embedding table, leading to unnecessary
memory consumption. In light of these concerns, we introduce a reinforcement
learning-driven framework, namely AutoAssign+, that facilitates Automatic
Shared Embedding Assignment Plus. To be specific, AutoAssign+ utilizes an
Identity Agent as an actor network, which plays a dual role: (i) Representing
low-frequency IDs field-wise with a small set of shared embeddings to enhance
the embedding initialization, and (ii) Dynamically determining which ID
features should be retained or eliminated in the embedding table. The policy of
the agent is optimized with the guidance of a critic network. To evaluate the
effectiveness of our approach, we perform extensive experiments on three
commonly used benchmark datasets. Our experiment results demonstrate that
AutoAssign+ is capable of significantly enhancing recommendation performance by
mitigating the cold-start problem. Furthermore, our framework yields a
reduction in memory usage of approximately 20-30%, verifying its practical
effectiveness and efficiency for streaming recommender systems.