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Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

research.google.com

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Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#41

Post by pcovington »

eva1984 wrote: post #38
pcovington wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video embeddings in the paper are learned purely based on observing what users co-watch in sessions. In this sense, they can be thought of as latent factors in more traditional collaborative filtering approaches. When we inspect them, nearby vectors have a surprising amount of semantic similarity. Features about the videos such as titles and tags, as well as features derived from audio and video, are introduced i…

Are you guys using similar model like Word2Vec for obtaining the video embeddings?

word2vec did inspire earlier iterations of the model, but the key insight is that embeddings are learned jointly with all other model parameters. There is no separate source of embeddings. This way, embeddings are specialized for the the specific task.

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#42

Post by pcovington »

5olidor wrote: post #32
alphydan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. But that might be a local minimum. "Show him boobs and action trailers" is guaranteed to make him stay another 40min. But perhaps there is a more risky strategy that takes longer to craft and actually delivers hours and hours of content to the user (but needs to fail longer before getting there).

It seems like reinforcement learning would be useful, i.e. at a high level, forming a policy for recommendations would require balancing exploration (experimenting with more risky recommendations) vs. exploitation (showing you recommendations that it knows will likely lead to clicks) and using the click-throughs, time spent watching the video, etc. as reward signals. Does anyone know whether RL is used for recommenda…

This is a very natural avenue and an active area of research at Google/Deep Mind. Stay tuned...

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#43

Post by seanwilson »

makeee wrote: post #36
seanwilson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify. The addition of Discover Weekly really confused me. Shouldn't the features that create a radio station from an artist or a playlist fill this need already? Why is it only updated weekly? I haven't tried other services much but it feels like Spotify isn't doing as much as they can with recommendations.

I think it's because people are used to listening to their Playlists. It feels more natural to check your "Discover Weekly" playlist then a whole new section within Spotify. And I think the decision to only update it ever Monday was pretty genius. Most people aren't particularly excited when Monday rolls around.. but when they think about the fact that it's Monday they are likely to remember they have a brand new Dis…

> I think it's because people are used to listening to their Playlists.

I wonder if there's any data on how common this is. I listen to large shared playlists or the radio feature the vast majority of the time to try to find new music.

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#45

Post by keidoublecee »

seanwilson wrote: post #25
dsco wrote: post #22

One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify. It's helped me reconsider my relationship to music which I basically thought was dead since I had hit a rut on exploring new artists. There's an interesting presentation of how it's created on SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execut...

> One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify. The addition of Discover Weekly really confused me. Shouldn't the features that create a radio station from an artist or a playlist fill this need already? Why is it only updated weekly? I haven't tried other services much but it feels like Spotify isn't doing as much as they can with recommendations.

It's just you're not the target listener of the service.

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#47

Post by flashman »

dsco wrote: post #22

One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify. It's helped me reconsider my relationship to music which I basically thought was dead since I had hit a rut on exploring new artists. There's an interesting presentation of how it's created on SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/from-idea-to-execut...

This is one of my very favourite features of Spotify, because they consistently serve up songs that I like listening to. (Although I'm sure there's the psychological factor of me thinking "these songs were picked just for me, therefore they are good"...)

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#48

Post by sevenless »

hacker42 wrote: post #37
pcovington wrote: post #17

Author here - happy to answer questions about the techniques in the paper. We're super excited to finally share this work externally. Feedback about YouTube recommendations in general also welcome.

Do you study the phenomenon of information bubbles at Google? Let's say, a German user just happens to watch some right-wing populist video claiming that we need to stop Merkel's refugee politics. The next day the user might receive plenty of recommendations in their feed that confirm the message in the first video. They happen to stumble upon a video of some party convention by an uprising German populist party, and…

What about the reverse scenario, though? Should someone who watches videos about refugee suffering be given anti-refugee video recommendations, lest they be dragged into a 'left wing ideology'? I don't see how that would be acceptable. Would Holocaust documentaries be 'diversified' with Holocaust denial videos?

'Information bubbles' have existed as long as people have had a choice of newspapers to buy and TV channels to watch. Calling for Youtube to artificially 'balance' videos seems like political interference.

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#49

Post by 2bitencryption »

makeee wrote: post #36
seanwilson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify. The addition of Discover Weekly really confused me. Shouldn't the features that create a radio station from an artist or a playlist fill this need already? Why is it only updated weekly? I haven't tried other services much but it feels like Spotify isn't doing as much as they can with recommendations.

I think it's because people are used to listening to their Playlists. It feels more natural to check your "Discover Weekly" playlist then a whole new section within Spotify. And I think the decision to only update it ever Monday was pretty genius. Most people aren't particularly excited when Monday rolls around.. but when they think about the fact that it's Monday they are likely to remember they have a brand new Dis…

I have Android Auto in my car, and my favorite part of the terrible, traffic-ridden commute from Redmond to Bellevue is listening to my Discover Weekly playlist. Even though I only really like about 10% of what it picks, usually in that 10% I find an artist I really enjoy and dig into that.

Re: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations

#50

Post by 2bitencryption »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20
pcovington wrote: post #17

Author here - happy to answer questions about the techniques in the paper. We're super excited to finally share this work externally. Feedback about YouTube recommendations in general also welcome.

I'm most curious about this part: n conjugation with other product areas across Google, YouTube has undergone a fundamental paradigm shift to- wards using deep learning as a general-purpose solution for nearly all learning problems. Can you talk about how this works in practice? Is the deep learning group separate from other teams and then tackles problems from different areas as needed, or are there deep learning en…

What I've heard from Google employees is that if you work there, you are getting training on Deep Learning for sure. It doesn't matter what team you're on, Google is now essentially a deep learning company (which sells ads).
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