• RecStudio
• • Description
  • • Model Structure
    • Dataset Structure
    • Model Evaluation
    • ANNs & Sampler
    • Loss & Score
  • Features
  • Quick Start
  • Automatic Hyper-parameter Tuning
  • Contributing
  • The Team
  • License

RecStudio

RecStudio is a unified, highly-modularized and recommendation-efficient recommendation library based on PyTorch. All the algorithms are
categorized as follows according to recommendation tasks.

• General Recommendation
• Sequential Recommendation
• Knowledge-based Recommendation
• Feature-based Recommendation
• Social Recommendation

Description

Model Structure

At the core of the library, all recommendation models are grouped into three base classes:

• TowerFreeRecommender: The most flexible base class, which enables any complex feature-interaction modeling.
• ItemTowerRecommender: Item encoder are separated from recommender, enabling fast ANN and model-based negative sampling.
• TwoTowerRecommender: The subclass of ItemTowerRecommender, where recommenders only consist of user encoder and item encoder.

Dataset Structure

For the dataset structure, the datasets are divided into five categories:

Dataset	Application	Examples
MFDataset	Dataset for providing user-item-rating triplet	BPR, NCF, CML et al.
AEDataset	Dataset for AutoEncoder-based ItemTowerRecommender	MultiVAE, RecVAE, et al.
SeqDataset	Dataset for Sequential recommenders with Causal Prediction	GRU4Rec, SASRec, et al.
Seq2SeqDataset	Dataset for Sequential recommenders with Masked Prediction	Bert4Rec, et al.
ALSDataset	Dataset for recommenders optimized by alternating least square	WRMF, et al.

In order to accelerate dataset processing, processed dataset are automatically cached for repeatable training shortly.

Model Evaluation

Almost all common metrics used in recommender systems are implemented in RecStudio based on PyTorch, such as NDCG, Recall, Precision, et al. All metric functions have the same interface, being fully implemented with tensor operators. Therefore, the evaluation procedure can be moved to GPU, leading to a remarkable speedup of evaluation.

ANNs & Sampler

In order to accelerate training and evaluation, RecStudio integrates various Approximate Nearest Neighbor
search (ANNs) and negative samplers. By building indexes with ANNs, the topk operator based on Euclidean distance, inner product and cosine similarity can be significantly accelerated. Negative samplers consist of static sampler and model-based samplers developed by RecStudio
team. Static samplers consist of Uniform Sampler and Popularity Sampler. The model-based samplers are based on either quantization of item vectors or importance resampling. Moreover, we also implement static sampling in the dataset, which enables us to generate negatives when loading data.

Loss & Score

In RecStudio, loss functions are categorized into three types:
- FullScoreLoss: Calculating scores on the whole items, such as SoftmaxLoss.
- PairwiseLoss: Calculating scores on positive and negative items, such as BPRLoss,
BinaryCrossEntropyLoss, et al.
- PointwiseLoss: Calculating scores for a single (user,item) interaction, such as HingeLoss.

Score functions are used to model users' preference on items. Various common score functions are
implemented in RecStudio, such as: InnerProduct, EuclideanDistance, CosineDistance, MLPScorer,
et al.

Loss	Math Type	Sampling Distribution	Calculation Complexity	Sampling Complexity	Convergence Speed	Related Metrics
Softmax		No sampling		-	very fast	NDCG
Sampled Softmax		No sampling		-	fast	NDCG
BPR		Uniform sampling			slow	AUC
WARP		Reject Sampling		slower and slower	slow	Precision
InfoNCE		Popularity sampling			fast	DCG
WRMF		No sampling		-	very fast	-
PRIS		Cluster sampling			very fast	DCG

Figure: RecStudio Framework

Features

• General Dataset Structure A unified dataset config based on atomic data files and automatic data cache
  are supported in RecStudio.
• Modular Model Structure By organizing the whole recommender into different modules, loss functions, scoring
  functions, samplers and ANNs, you can customize your model like building blocks.
• GPU Acceleration The whole operation from model training to model evaluation could be easily moved to
  on GPUs and distributed GPUs for running.
• Simple Model Categorization RecStudio categorizes all the models based on the number of encoders,
  which is easy to understand and use. The taxonomy can cover all models.
• Simple and Complex Negative Samplers RecStudio integrates static and model-based samplers with only tensor operators.

Quick Start

By downloading the source code, you can run th provided script run.py for initial usage of RecStudio.

python run.py

The initial config will train and evaluate BPR model on MovieLens-100k(ml-100k) dataset.

Generally speaking, the simple example will take less than one minute with GPUs. And the output will be
like below:

[2022-04-11 14:30:29] INFO (faiss.loader/MainThread) Loading faiss with AVX2 support.
[2022-04-11 14:30:29] INFO (faiss.loader/MainThread) Loading faiss.
[2022-04-11 14:30:29] INFO (faiss.loader/MainThread) Successfully loaded faiss.
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.seed/MainThread) Global seed set to 42
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) learning_rate=0.001
weight_decay=0
learner=adam
scheduler=None
epochs=100
batch_size=2048
num_workers=0
gpu=None
ann=None
sampler=None
negative_count=1
dataset_sampling_count=None
embed_dim=64
item_bias=False
eval_batch_size=20
split_ratio=[0.8, 0.1, 0.1]
test_metrics=['recall', 'precision', 'map', 'ndcg', 'mrr', 'hit']
val_metrics=['recall', 'ndcg']
topk=100
cutoff=10
early_stop_mode=max
split_mode=user_entry
shuffle=True
use_fields=['user_id', 'item_id', 'rating']
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) save_dir:/home/RecStudio/
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.distributed/MainThread) GPU available: True, used: False
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.distributed/MainThread) TPU available: False, using: 0 TPU cores
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.distributed/MainThread) IPU available: False, using: 0 IPUs
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.distributed/MainThread) The following callbacks returned in `LightningModule.configure_callbacks` will override existing callbacks passed to Trainer: ModelCheckpoint
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.core.lightning/MainThread) 
  | Name         | Type               | Params
----------------------------------------------------
0 | loss_fn      | BPRLoss            | 0     
1 | score_func   | InnerProductScorer | 0     
2 | item_encoder | Embedding          | 107 K 
3 | sampler      | UniformSampler     | 0     
4 | user_encoder | Embedding          | 60.4 K
----------------------------------------------------
168 K     Trainable params
0         Non-trainable params
168 K     Total params
0.673     Total estimated model params size (MB)
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning.callbacks.early_stopping/MainThread) Metric recall@10 improved. New best score: 0.007
[2022-04-11 14:30:30] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) Training: Epoch=  0 [recall@10=0.0074 ndcg@10=0.0129 train_loss=0.6932]
[2022-04-11 14:30:31] INFO (pytorch_lightning.callbacks.early_stopping/MainThread) Metric recall@10 improved by 0.006 >= min_delta = 0.0. New best score: 0.014
[2022-04-11 14:30:31] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) Training: Epoch=  1 [recall@10=0.0135 ndcg@10=0.0251 train_loss=0.6915]
[2022-04-11 14:30:32] INFO (pytorch_lightning.callbacks.early_stopping/MainThread) Metric recall@10 improved by 0.038 >= min_delta = 0.0. New best score: 0.051
...
[2022-04-11 14:31:26] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) Training: Epoch= 75 [recall@10=0.2074 ndcg@10=0.2942 train_loss=0.1909]
[2022-04-11 14:31:26] INFO (pytorch_lightning.callbacks.early_stopping/MainThread) Monitored metric recall@10 did not improve in the last 10 records. Best score: 0.211. Signaling Trainer to stop.
[2022-04-11 14:31:26] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) Training: Epoch= 76 [recall@10=0.2073 ndcg@10=0.2949 train_loss=0.1899]
[2022-04-11 14:31:26] INFO (pytorch_lightning.utilities.distributed/MainThread) The following callbacks returned in `LightningModule.configure_callbacks` will override existing callbacks passed to Trainer: EarlyStopping, ModelCheckpoint
[2022-04-11 14:31:27] INFO (pytorch_lightning/MainThread) Testing:  [recall@10=0.2439 precision@10=0.1893 map@10=0.5762 ndcg@10=0.3718 mrr@10=0.4487 hit@10=0.7815]

If you want to change models or datasets, command line is ready for you.

python run.py -m=NCF -d=ml-1m 

• Supported commandline arguments:

  args	type	description	default	optional
  -m,--model	str	model name	BPR	all the models in RecStudio
  -d,--dataset	str	dataset name	ml-100k	all the datasets supported by RecStudio
  --data_dir	str	dataset folder	datasets	folders that could be read by RecStudio
  mode	str	training mode	light	['light','detail','tune']
  --learning_rate	float	learning rate	0.001
  --learner	str	optimizer name	adam	['adam','sgd','adasgd','rmsprop','sparse_adam']
  --weight_decay	float	weight decay for optimizer	0
  --epochs	int	training epoch	20,50
  --batch_size	int	the size of mini batch in training	2048
  --eval_batch_size	int	the size of mini batch in evaluation	128
  --embed_dim	int	the output size of embedding layers	64

• For ItemTowerRecommender, some extra args are supported:

  args	type	description	default	optional
  --sampler	str	sampler name	uniform	['uniform','popularity','midx_uni','midx_pop','cluster_uni','cluster_pop']
  --negative_count	int	number of negative samples	1	positive integer

• For TwoTowerRecommender, some extra args are supported based on ItemTowerRecommender:

  args	type	description	default	optional
  --split_mode	str	split methods for the dataset	user_entry	['user','entry','user_entry']

Here are some details of some unclear arguments.

1. mode ：in light mode and detail mode, the output will displayed on the terminal, while
   the latter provide more detailed info. tune mode will use Neural Network Intelligence(NNI) to show
   a beautiful visual interface. You can run like tune.sh with a config file like config.yaml. For
   more details about NNI, please refer to NNI Documentation.
2. sampler: uniform stands for UniformSampler is used. popularity stands for sampling according
   to the item popularity (more popular items are sampled with higher probablities). midx_uni,midx_pop
   are midx dynamic sampler, please refer to FastVAE for more details.
   cluster_uni,cluster_pop are cluster dynamic sampler, please refer to
   PRIS for more details.
3. split_mode: user means spliting all users into train/valid/test datasets, users in
   those datasets are disjoint. entry means spliting all the interactions in those three dataset.
   user_entry means spliting interaction of each user into three parts.

Also, you can install RecStudio from PyPi:

pip install recstudio

For basic usage like below:

import recstudio
recstudio.run(model="BPR", data_dir="./datasets/", dataset='ml-100k')

For more detailed information, please refer to our documentation https://recstudio.readthedocs.io/.

Automatic Hyper-parameter Tuning

RecStudio integrates with NNI module for tuning the hype-parameters automatically. For easy usage,
you can run tune.sh script with your specific config file like the provided file config.yaml.

For more detailed infomation about NNI, please refer to
NNI Documentation.

Contributing

Please let us know if you encounter a bug or have any suggestions by
submitting an issue.

We welcome all contributions from bug fixes to new features and extensions.

We expect all contributions firstly discussed in the issue tracker and then going through PRs.

The Team

RecStudio is developed and maintained by USTC BigData Lab.

User	Contributions
@DefuLian	Framework design and construction
@AngusHuang17	Sequential model, docs, bugs fixing
@Xiuchen519	Knowledge-based model, bugs fixing
@JennahF	NCF,CML,logisticMF models
@HERECJ	AutoEncoder models
@BinbinJin	IRGAN model

License

RecStudio uses MIT License.