# Recurrent Binary Embedding for GPU-Enabled Exhaustive Retrieval from Billion-Scale Semantic Vectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06466 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06466/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

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- [Unsupervised Multi-Index Semantic Hashing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14460/) (2021)
- [Projected Hamming Dissimilarity for Bit-Level Importance Coding in Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14455/) (2021)
- [HCFRec: Hash Collaborative Filtering via Normalized Flow with Structural Consensus for Efficient Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12042/) (2022)
- [Representation Learning for Efficient and Effective Similarity Search and Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01815/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid advances in GPU hardware and multiple areas of Deep Learning open up a new opportunity for billion-scale information retrieval with exhaustive search. Building on top of the powerful concept of semantic learning, this paper proposes a Recurrent Binary Embedding (RBE) model that learns compact representations for real-time retrieval. The model has the unique ability to refine a base binary vector by progressively adding binary residual vectors to meet the desired accuracy. The refined vector enables efficient implementation of exhaustive similarity computation with bit-wise operations, followed by a near- lossless k-NN selection algorithm, also proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithms are integrated into an end-to-end multi-GPU system that retrieves thousands of top items from over a billion candidates in real-time. The RBE model and the retrieval system were evaluated with data from a major paid search engine. When measured against the state-of-the-art model for binary representation and the full precision model for semantic embedding, RBE significantly outperformed the former, and filled in over 80% of the AUC gap in-between. Experiments comparing with our production retrieval system also demonstrated superior performance. While the primary focus of this paper is to build RBE based on a particular class of semantic models, generalizing to other types is straightforward, as exemplified by two different models at the end of the paper.