Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

Paul Covington
Jay Adams
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016) (to appear)
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Abstract

YouTube represents one of the largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence. In this paper, we describe the system at a high level and focus on the dramatic performance improvements brought by deep learning. The paper is split according to the classic two-stage information retrieval dichotomy: first, we detail a deep candidate generation model and then describe a separate deep ranking model. We also provide practical lessons and insights derived from designing, iterating and maintaining a massive recommendation system with enormous user-facing impact.