TorchRec: a PyTorch Domain Library for Recommendation Systems

Abstract

Recommendation Systems (RecSys) comprise a large footprint of production-deployed AI today. The neural network-based recommender systems differ from deep learning models in other domains in using high-cardinality categorical sparse features that require large embedding tables to be trained. In this talk we introduce TorchRec, a PyTorch domain library for Recommendation Systems. This new library provides common sparsity and parallelism primitives, enabling researchers to build state-of-the-art personalization models and deploy them in production. In this talk we cover the building blocks of the TorchRec library including modeling primitives such as embedding bags and jagged tensors, optimized recommender system kernels powered by FBGEMM, a flexible sharder that supports a veriety of strategies for partitioning embedding tables, a planner that automatically generates optimized and performant sharding plans, support for GPU inference and common modeling modules for building recommender system models. TorchRec library is currently used to train large-scale recommender models at Meta. We will present how TorchRec helped Meta’s recommender system platform to transition from CPU asynchronous training to accelerator-based full-sync training.