arXiv Machine Learning By Sanjay Surendranath Girija, Aniruddh Nath, Li Wei, Yanhao Jiang, Shawn Andrews, Lukasz Heldt, Yi Wu, Aditya Mahajan, Mohit Sharma

Lightweight Ranking Heads: Accelerating Multi-Task Experimentation in Production Recommender Systems

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces Lightweight Ranking Heads (Light Heads), a framework that allows new prediction tasks to be added to large multi-task recommender systems without retraining the backbone model. By using stop‑gradients and stateless daily training, Light Heads isolate new tasks, preventing conflicts with existing ones. Deployed at YouTube scale, the approach cuts multi‑task experimentation cycles from weeks to days, enabling faster A/B testing and deployment of new ranking tasks.

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