Extreme Classification (XC) aims to map a query to the most relevant documents from a very large document set. XC algorithms used in real-world applications typically learn this mapping from datasets curated from implicit feedback, such as user clicks. However, these datasets often suffer from missing labels. In this work, we observe that systematic missing labels lead to missing knowledge, which is critical for modelling relevance between queries and documents. We formally show that this absence of knowledge is hard to recover using existing methods such as propensity weighting and data imputation strategies that solely rely on the training dataset. While Large Language Models (LLMs) provide an attractive solution to augment the missing knowledge, leveraging them in applications with low latency requirements and large document sets is challenging. To mitigate missing knowledge at scale, we propose SKIM (Scalable Knowledge Infusion for Missing Labels), an algorithm that leverages a combination of Small Language Models or SLMs, e.g., Llama2-7b, and abundant unstructured meta-data to effectively address the missing label problem. We show the efficacy of our method on large-scale public datasets through a combination of unbiased evaluation strategies, such as exhaustive human annotations and simulation-based evaluation benchmarks. SKIM outperforms existing methods on Recall@100 by more than 10 absolute points. Additionally, SKIM scales to proprietary query-ad retrieval datasets containing 10 million documents, outperforming baseline methods by 12% in offline evaluations and increasing ad click-yield by 1.23% in an online A/B test conducted on Bing Search. We release the code and trained models at: github.com/bicycleman15/skim

We develop accurate and efficient solutions for large-scale retrieval tasks where novel (zero-shot) items can arrive continuously at a rapid pace. Conventional Siamese-style approaches embed both queries and items through a small encoder and retrieve the items lying closest to the query. While this approach allows efficient addition and retrieval of novel items, the small encoder lacks sufficient capacity for the necessary world knowledge in complex retrieval tasks. The extreme classification approaches have addressed this by learning a separate classifier for each item observed in the training set which significantly increases the representation capacity of the model. Such classifiers outperform Siamese approaches on observed items, but cannot be trained for novel items due to data and latency constraints. To bridge these gaps, this paper develops: (1) A new algorithmic framework, EMMETT, which efficiently synthesizes classifiers on-the-fly for novel items, by relying on the readily available classifiers for observed items; (2) A new algorithm, IRENE, which is a simple and effective instance of EMMETT that is specifically suited for large-scale deployments, and (3) A new theoretical framework for analyzing the generalization performance in large-scale zero-shot retrieval which guides our algorithm and training related design decisions. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on a wide range of retrieval tasks which demonstrate that IRENE improves the zero-shot retrieval accuracy by up to 15% points in Recall@10 when added on top of leading encoders. Additionally, on an online A/B test in a large-scale ad retrieval task in a major search engine, IRENE improved the ad click-through rate by 4.2%. Lastly, we validate our design choices through extensive ablative experiments. The source code for IRENE is available at https://aka.ms/irene.

The task of annotating a data point with labels most relevant to it from a large universe of labels is referred to as Extreme Classification (XC). State-of-the-art XC methods have applications in ranking, recommendation, and tagging and mostly employ a combination architecture comprised of a deep encoder and a high-capacity classifier. These two components are often trained in a modular fashion to conserve compute. This paper shows that in XC settings where data paucity and semantic gap issues abound, this can lead to suboptimal encoder training which negatively affects the performance of the overall architecture. The paper then proposes a lightweight alternative DEXA that augments encoder training with auxiliary parameters. Incorporating DEXA into existing XC architectures requires minimal modifications and the method can scale to datasets with 40 million labels and offer predictions that are up to 6% and 15% more accurate than embeddings offered by existing deep XC methods on benchmark and proprietary datasets, respectively. The paper also analyzes DEXA theoretically and shows that it offers provably superior encoder training than existing Siamese training strategies in certain realizable settings. Code for DEXA is available at https://github.com/Extreme-classification/dexa.