Representation learning, a task of learning latent vectors to represent entities, is a key task in improving search and recommender systems in web applications. Various representation learning methods have been developed, including graph-based approaches for relationships among entities, sequence-based methods for capturing the temporal evolution of user activities, and content-based models for leveraging text and visual content. However, the development of a unifying framework that integrates these diverse techniques to support multiple applications remains a significant challenge. This paper presents OmniSage, a large-scale representation framework that learns universal representations for a variety of applications at Pinterest. OmniSage integrates graph neural networks with content-based models and user sequence models by employing multiple contrastive learning tasks to effectively process graph data, user sequence data, and content signals. To support the training and inference of OmniSage, we developed an efficient infrastructure capable of supporting Pinterest graphs with billions of nodes. The universal representations generated by OmniSage have significantly enhanced user experiences on Pinterest, leading to an approximate 2.5% increase in sitewide repins (saves) across five applications. This paper highlights the impact of unifying representation learning methods, and we make the model code publicly available at https://github.com/pinterest/atg-research/tree/main/omnisage.

User activity sequences have emerged as one of the most important signals in recommender systems.We present a foundational model, PinFM, for understanding user activity sequences across multiple applications at a billion-scale visual discovery platform.We pretrain a transformer model with 20B+ parameters using extensive user activity data, then fine-tune it for specific applications, efficiently coupling it with existing models.While this pretrainingand-fine-tuning approach has been popular in other domains, such as Vision and NLP, its application in industrial recommender systems presents numerous challenges.The foundational model must be scalable enough to score millions of items every second while meeting tight cost and latency constraints imposed by these systems,.Additionally, it should capture the interactions between user activities and other features and handle new items that were not present during the pretraining stage.We developed innovative techniques to address these challenges.Our infrastructure and algorithmic optimizations, such as the Deduplicated Cross-Attention Transformer (DCAT), improved our throughput by 600% on Pinterest internal data.We demonstrate that PinFM can learn interactions between user sequences and candidate items * Work done at Pinterest.

Learned embeddings for products are an important building block for web-scale e-commerce recommendation systems. At Pinterest, we build a single set of product embeddings called ItemSage to provide relevant recommendations in all shopping use cases including user, image and search based recommendations. This approach has led to significant improvements in engagement and conversion metrics, while reducing both infrastructure and maintenance cost. While most prior work focuses on building product embeddings from features coming from a single modality, we introduce a transformer-based architecture capable of aggregating information from both text and image modalities and show that it significantly outperforms single modality baselines. We also utilize multi-task learning to make ItemSage optimized for several engagement types, leading to a candidate generation system that is efficient for all of the engagement objectives of the end-to-end recommendation system. Extensive offline experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach and results from online A/B experiments show substantial gains in key business metrics (up to +7% gross merchandise value/user and +11% click volume).

Sequential models have become increasingly popular in powering personalized recommendation systems over the past several years. These approaches traditionally model a user's actions on a website as a sequence to predict the user's next action. While theoretically simplistic, these models are quite challenging to deploy in production, commonly requiring streaming infrastructure to reflect the latest user activity and potentially managing mutable data for encoding a user's hidden state. Here we introduce PinnerFormer, a user representation trained to predict a user's future long-term engagement using a sequential model of a user's recent actions. Unlike prior approaches, we adapt our modeling to a batch infrastructure via our new dense all-action loss, modeling long-term future actions instead of next action prediction. We show that by doing so, we significantly close the gap between batch user embeddings that are generated once a day and realtime user embeddings generated whenever a user takes an action. We describe our design decisions via extensive offline experimentation and ablations and validate the efficacy of our approach in A/B experiments showing substantial improvements in Pinterest's user retention and engagement when comparing PinnerFormer against our previous user representation. PinnerFormer is deployed in production as of Fall 2021.

In this work, we present our journey to revolutionize the personalized recommendation engine through end-to-end learning from raw user actions. We encode user’s long-term interest in PinnerFormer, a user embedding optimized for long-term future actions via a new dense all-action loss, and capture user’s short-term intention by directly learning from the real-time action sequences. We conducted both offline and online experiments to validate the performance of the new model architecture, and also address the challenge of serving such a complex model using mixed CPU/GPU setup in production. The proposed system has been deployed in production at Pinterest and has delivered significant online gains across organic and Ads applications.

Spam is a serious problem plaguing web-scale digital platforms which facilitate user content creation and distribution. It compromises platform's integrity, performance of services like recommendation and search, and overall business. Spammers engage in a variety of abusive and evasive behavior which are distinct from non-spammers. Users' complex behavior can be well represented by a heterogeneous graph rich with node and edge attributes. Learning to identify spammers in such a graph for a web-scale platform is challenging because of its structural complexity and size. In this paper, we propose SEINE (Spam DEtection using Interaction NEtworks), a spam detection model over a novel graph framework. Our graph simultaneously captures rich users' details and behavior and enables learning on a billion-scale graph. Our model considers neighborhood along with edge types and attributes, allowing it to capture a wide range of spammers. SEINE, trained on a real dataset of tens of millions of nodes and billions of edges, achieves a high performance of 80% recall with 1% false positive rate. SEINE achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art techniques on a public dataset while being pragmatic to be used in a large-scale production system.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) can efficiently integrate graph structure and node features to learn high-quality node embeddings. At Pinterest, we have developed and deployed PinSage, a data-efficient GCN that learns pin embeddings from the Pin-Board graph. Pinterest relies heavily on PinSage which in turn only leverages the Pin-Board graph. However, there exist several entities at Pinterest and heterogeneous interactions among these entities. These diverse entities and interactions provide important signal for recommendations and modeling. In this work, we show that training deep learning models on graphs that captures these diverse interactions can result in learning higher-quality pin embeddings than training PinSage on only the Pin-Board graph. However, building a large-scale heterogeneous graph engine that can process the entire Pinterest size data has not yet been done. In this work, we present a clever and effective solution where we break the heterogeneous graph into multiple disjoint bipartite graphs and then develop novel data-efficient MultiBiSage model that combines the signals from them. MultiBiSage can capture the graph structure of multiple bipartite graphs to learn high-quality pin embeddings. The benefit of our approach is that individual bipartite graphs can be processed with minimal changes to Pinterest's current infrastructure, while being able to combine information from all the graphs while achieving high performance. We train MultiBiSage on six bipartite graphs including our Pin-Board graph and show that it significantly outperforms the deployed latest version of PinSage on multiple user engagement metrics. We also perform experiments on two public datasets to show that MultiBiSage is generalizable and can be applied to datasets outside of Pinterest.

Latent user representations are widely adopted in the tech industry for powering personalized recommender systems. Most prior work infers a single high dimensional embedding to represent a user, which is a good starting point but falls short in delivering a full understanding of the user's interests. In this work, we introduce PinnerSage, an end-to-end recommender system that represents each user via multi-modal embeddings and leverages this rich representation of users to provides high quality personalized recommendations. PinnerSage achieves this by clustering users' actions into conceptually coherent clusters with the help of a hierarchical clustering method (Ward) and summarizes the clusters via representative pins (Medoids) for efficiency and interpretability. PinnerSage is deployed in production at Pinterest and we outline the several design decisions that makes it run seamlessly at a very large scale. We conduct several offline and online A/B experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms single embedding methods.

As online content becomes ever more visual, the demand for searching by visual queries grows correspondingly stronger. Shop The Look is an online shopping discovery service at Pinterest, leveraging visual search to enable users to find and buy products within an image. In this work, we provide a holistic view of how we built Shop The Look, a shopping oriented visual search system, along with lessons learned from addressing shopping needs. We discuss topics including core technology across object detection and visual embeddings, serving infrastructure for realtime inference, and data labeling methodology for training/evaluation data collection and human evaluation. The user-facing impacts of our system design choices are measured through offline evaluations, human relevance judgements, and online A/B experiments. The collective improvements amount to cumulative relative gains of over 160% in end-to-end human relevance judgements and over 80% in engagement. Shop The Look is deployed in production at Pinterest.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are a powerful class of graph neural networks. Trained in a semi-supervised end-to-end fashion, GCNs can learn to integrate node features and graph structures to generate high-quality embeddings that can be used for various downstream tasks like search and recommendation. However, existing GCNs mostly work on homogeneous graphs and consider a single embedding for each node, which do not sufficiently model the multi-facet nature and complex interaction of nodes in real-world networks. Here, we present a contextualized GCN engine by modeling the multipartite networks of target nodes and their intermediatecontext nodes that specify the contexts of their interactions. Towards the neighborhood aggregation process, we devise a contextual masking operation at the feature level and a contextual attention mechanism at the node level to achieve interaction contextualization by treating neighboring target nodes based on intermediate context nodes. Consequently, we compute multiple embeddings for target nodes that capture their diverse facets and different interactions during graph convolution, which is useful for fine-grained downstream applications. To enable efficient web-scale training, we build a parallel random walk engine to pre-sample contextualized neighbors, and a Hadoop2-based data provider pipeline to pre-join training data, dynamically reduce multi-GPU training time, and avoid high memory cost. Extensive experiments on the bipartite Pinterest graph and tripartite OAG graph corroborate the advantage of the proposed system.

At Pinterest, we utilize image embeddings throughout our search and recommendation systems to help our users navigate through visual content by powering experiences like browsing of related content and searching for exact products for shopping. In this work we describe a multi-task deep metric learning system to learn a single unified image embedding which can be used to power our multiple visual search products. The solution we present not only allows us to train for multiple application objectives in a single deep neural network architecture, but takes advantage of correlated information in the combination of all training data from each application to generate a unified embedding that outperforms all specialized embeddings previously deployed for each product.

Recommender systems that can learn from cross-session data to dynamically predict the next item a user will choose are crucial for online platforms. However, existing approaches often use out-of-the-box sequence models which are limited by speed and memory consumption, are often infeasible for production environments, and usually do not incorporate cross-session information, which is crucial for effective recommendations. Here we propose Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Networks (HierTCN), a hierarchical deep learning architecture that makes dynamic recommendations based on users' sequential multi-session interactions with items. HierTCN is designed for web-scale systems with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users. It consists of two levels of models: The high-level model uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to aggregate users' evolving long-term interests across different sessions, while the low-level model is implemented with Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), utilizing both the long-term interests and the short-term interactions within sessions to predict the next interaction. We conduct extensive experiments on a public XING dataset and a large-scale Pinterest dataset that contains 6 million users with 1.6 billion interactions. We show that HierTCN is 2.5x faster than RNN-based models and uses 90% less data memory compared to TCN-based models. We further develop an effective data caching scheme and a queue-based mini-batch generator, enabling our model to be trained within 24 hours on a single GPU. Our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic recommendation methods, with up to 18% improvement in recall and 10% in mean reciprocal rank.