Enhancing Performance and Scalability of Large-Scale Recommendation Systems with Jagged Flash Attention

Bibliographic Details
Title: Enhancing Performance and Scalability of Large-Scale Recommendation Systems with Jagged Flash Attention
Authors: Xu, Rengan, Yang, Junjie, Xu, Yifan, Li, Hong, Liu, Xing, Shankar, Devashish, Zhang, Haoci, Liu, Meng, Li, Boyang, Hu, Yuxi, Tang, Mingwei, Zhang, Zehua, Zhang, Tunhou, Li, Dai, Chen, Sijia, Musumeci, Gian-Paolo, Zhai, Jiaqi, Zhu, Bill, Yan, Hong, Reddy, Srihari
Publication Year: 2024
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Machine Learning, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science - Information Retrieval
More Details: The integration of hardware accelerators has significantly advanced the capabilities of modern recommendation systems, enabling the exploration of complex ranking paradigms previously deemed impractical. However, the GPU-based computational costs present substantial challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate our development of an efficiency-driven approach to explore these paradigms, moving beyond traditional reliance on native PyTorch modules. We address the specific challenges posed by ranking models' dependence on categorical features, which vary in length and complicate GPU utilization. We introduce Jagged Feature Interaction Kernels, a novel method designed to extract fine-grained insights from long categorical features through efficient handling of dynamically sized tensors. We further enhance the performance of attention mechanisms by integrating Jagged tensors with Flash Attention. Our novel Jagged Flash Attention achieves up to 9x speedup and 22x memory reduction compared to dense attention. Notably, it also outperforms dense flash attention, with up to 3x speedup and 53% more memory efficiency. In production models, we observe 10% QPS improvement and 18% memory savings, enabling us to scale our recommendation systems with longer features and more complex architectures.
Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures
Document Type: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1145/3640457.3688040
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15373
Accession Number: edsarx.2409.15373
Database: arXiv
More Details
DOI:10.1145/3640457.3688040