We’ll provide an introduction to Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

Slack, as a product, presents many opportunities for recommendation, where we can make suggestions to simplify the user experience and make it more delightful. Each one seems like a terrific use case for machine learning, but it isn’t realistic for us to create a bespoke solution for each. In the talk, we’ll dive into the Recommend API, a unified framework the team built over the years that allows us to quickly bootstrap new recommendation use cases. Behind the scenes, these recommenders reuse a common set of infrastructure for every part of the recommendation engine, such as data processing, model training, candidate generation, and monitoring. This has allowed us to deliver a number of different recommendation models across the product, driving improved customer experience in a variety of contexts.