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A Flash Attention Transformer for Multi-Behaviour Recommendation

Mukande, Tendai orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-0654-7141, Ali, Esraa orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-1600-3161, Caputo, Annalina orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-7144-8545, Dong, Ruihai orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-2509-1370 and O'Connor, Noel E. orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-4033-9135 (2023) A Flash Attention Transformer for Multi-Behaviour Recommendation. In: CIKM '23: The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 21 - 25 Oct. 2023, Birmingham United Kingdom. ISBN 9798400701245

Abstract
Recently, modelling heterogeneous interactions in recommender systems has attracted research interest. Real-world scenarios involve sequential multi-type user-item interactions such as “view”, “add-to-favourites”, “add-to-cart” and “purchase”. Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods have been widely adopted in Representation Learning of similar sequential user-item interactions. Promising results have been achieved by the integration of GNNs and transformers for self-attention. However, GNN based methods suffer from limited capability in handling global user-item interaction dependencies, particularly for long sequences. Moreover, these models require high computational cost of transformers, due to the quadratic memory and time complexity with respect to sequence length. This results in memory bottlenecks and slow training especially in computational resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, we propose the FATH model which employs Flash Attention mechanism to reduce the high-bandwidth memory usage over higher-order user-item interaction sequences. Experimental results show that our model improves the training speed and reduces the memory usage with better recommendation performance in comparison with the state-of the art baselines.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Flash Attention; Transformer; Multi-behaviour Recommendation; Graph Neural Networks
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Information retrieval
Computer Science > World Wide Web
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Published in: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '23). . ACM. ISBN 9798400701245
Publisher:ACM
Official URL:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3583780.3615206
Copyright Information:Authors
Funders:Research Ireland ML-LABS - Grant number 18/CRT/6183
ID Code:32650
Deposited On:18 May 2026 09:50 by Tendai Mukande . Last Modified 18 May 2026 09:50
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