REACTION: Parameter-Efficient Learning for Recommendation

Abstract

While deep learning (DL) has demonstrated significant success in recommender systems, it suffers from high computational complexity and poor scalability. In this work, we demonstrate, from an information-theoretic perspective, the redundancy of existing DL-based recommender models in two aspects: (1) Feature Redundancy. We show that many features are highly mutually correlated, noisy, or weakly predictive of user-item interaction labels. (2) Structural Redundancy. We further show that a large proportion of parameters in the dense layers contribute minimally to overall performance, indicating significant redundancy within the model architecture. To address these challenges, we propose REACTION (paRameter-Efficient LeArning for recommendaTION), an information-theoretic framework designed to reduce model complexity without sacrificing performance. REACTION consists of two core components: Adaptive Feature Extraction (AFE) leverages mutual information to project high-dimensional sparse features into a compact, informative subspace. This adaptively filters noisy or weak features, reduces embedding parameters, and preserves implicit feature interactions without explicit high-order computation. Dynamic Tower Fusion (DTF) bridges the representational gap between dual-tower expressiveness and single-tower efficiency. It facilitates rich cross-tower interactions during training, then merges the towers into a unified, low-latency single tower for inference. Extensive experiments on four large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that REACTION not only outperforms existing methods in accuracy but also achieves a drastic reduction in both model parameters and inference costs, thus establishing a new paradigm for efficient and scalable recommendation systems.