# GateFormer: Speeding Up News Feed Recommendation with Input Gated Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [Synthesizer: Rethinking Self-Attention in Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00743/) (2020)
- [Funnel-Transformer: Filtering out Sequential Redundancy for Efficient Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03236/) (2020)
- [DKN: Deep Knowledge-Aware Network for News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08284/) (2018)
- [Empowering News Recommendation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07413/) (2021)
- [Neural News Recommendation with Attentive Multi-View Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05576/) (2019)
- [Explainable Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04540/) (2018)
- [Training Large-Scale News Recommenders with Pretrained Language Models in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09268/) (2021)
- [NewsBERT: Distilling Pre-trained Language Model for Intelligent News Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04887/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Explainable Collaborative Filtering with Taste Clusters Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13937/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

News feed recommendation is an important web service. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been intensively applied to improve the recommendation quality. However, the utilization of these deep models is limited in many aspects, such as lack of explainability and being incompatible with the existing inverted index systems. Above all, the PLMs based recommenders are inefficient, as the encoding of user-side information will take huge computation costs. Although the computation can be accelerated with efficient transformers or distilled PLMs, it is still not enough to make timely recommendations for the active users, who are associated with super long news browsing histories. In this work, we tackle the efficient news recommendation problem from a distinctive perspective. Instead of relying on the entire input (i.e., the collection of news articles a user ever browsed), we argue that the user's interest can be fully captured merely with those representative keywords. Motivated by this, we propose GateFormer, where the input data is gated before feeding into transformers. The gating module is made personalized, lightweight and end-to-end learnable, such that it may perform accurate and efficient filtering of informative user input. GateFormer achieves highly impressive performances in experiments, where it notably outperforms the existing acceleration approaches in both accuracy and efficiency. We also surprisingly find that even with over 10-fold compression of the original input, GateFormer is still able to maintain on-par performances with the SOTA methods.