# CowClip: Reducing CTR Prediction Model Training Time from 12 hours to 10 minutes on 1 GPU

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [Deep & Cross Network for Ad Click Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05123/) (2017)
- [High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06171/) (2021)
- [Why gradient clipping accelerates training: A theoretical justification for adaptivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11881/) (2019)
- [Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03672/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Recommendation Model for Personalization and Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00091/) (2019)
- [DCN V2: Improved Deep & Cross Network and Practical Lessons for Web-scale Learning to Rank Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13535/) (2020)
- [AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11921/) (2018)
- [Train longer, generalize better: closing the generalization gap in large batch training of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08741/) (2017)
- [xDeepFM: Combining Explicit and Implicit Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05170/) (2018)
- [One weird trick for parallelizing convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.5997/) (2014)
- [Product-based Neural Networks for User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00144/) (2016)
- [Behavior Sequence Transformer for E-commerce Recommendation in Alibaba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06874/) (2019)
- [MLPerf Training Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01500/) (2019)
- [A Closer Look at Deep Learning Heuristics: Learning rate restarts, Warmup and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.13243/) (2018)
- [Software-Hardware Co-design for Fast and Scalable Training of Deep Learning Recommendation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05158/) (2021)
- [Slow and Stale Gradients Can Win the Race: Error-Runtime Trade-offs in Distributed SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01113/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning over Multi-field Categorical Data: A Case Study on User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02376/) (2016)
- [Distributed Hierarchical GPU Parameter Server for Massive Scale Deep Learning Ads Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05622/) (2020)
- [Fi-GNN: Modeling Feature Interactions via Graph Neural Networks for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05552/) (2019)
- [Open Benchmarking for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05794/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10117/) (2022)
- [Good Intentions: Adaptive Parameter Management via Intent Signaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00470/) (2022)
- [Helen: Optimizing CTR Prediction Models with Frequency-wise Hessian Eigenvalue Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00798/) (2024)
- [Can One-Shot Test-Time Data Augmentation Help with Generalization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00114/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The click-through rate (CTR) prediction task is to predict whether a user will click on the recommended item. As mind-boggling amounts of data are produced online daily, accelerating CTR prediction model training is critical to ensuring an up-to-date model and reducing the training cost. One approach to increase the training speed is to apply large batch training. However, as shown in computer vision and natural language processing tasks, training with a large batch easily suffers from the loss of accuracy. Our experiments show that previous scaling rules fail in the training of CTR prediction neural networks. To tackle this problem, we first theoretically show that different frequencies of ids make it challenging to scale hyperparameters when scaling the batch size. To stabilize the training process in a large batch size setting, we develop the adaptive Column-wise Clipping (CowClip). It enables an easy and effective scaling rule for the embeddings, which keeps the learning rate unchanged and scales the L2 loss. We conduct extensive experiments with four CTR prediction networks on two real-world datasets and successfully scaled 128 times the original batch size without accuracy loss. In particular, for CTR prediction model DeepFM training on the Criteo dataset, our optimization framework enlarges the batch size from 1K to 128K with over 0.1% AUC improvement and reduces training time from 12 hours to 10 minutes on a single V100 GPU. Our code locates at https://github.com/bytedance/LargeBatchCTR.