Enhancing Scalability in Recommender Systems through Lottery Ticket Hypothesis and Knowledge Distillation-based Neural Network Pruning

Abstract

This study introduces an innovative approach aimed at the efficient pruning of neural networks, with a particular focus on their deployment on edge devices. Our method involves the integration of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) with the Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework, resulting in the formulation of three distinct pruning models. These models have been developed to address scalability issue in recommender systems, whereby the complexities of deep learning models have hindered their practical deployment. With judicious application of the pruning techniques, we effectively curtail the power consumption and model dimensions without compromising on accuracy. Empirical evaluation has been performed using two real world datasets from diverse domains against two baselines. Gratifyingly, our approaches yielded a GPU computation-power reduction of up to 66.67%. Notably, our study contributes to the field of recommendation system by pioneering the application of LTH and KD.