Efficient Swing Computation for Retrieval in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Given a user-item graph $G$, a query item $v_q$ and a target item $v_t$, the Swing score $sw(v_q, v_t)$ of the item pair $(v_q, v_t)$ leverages the user-item-user interaction structure to evaluate their similarity. This measure is found to be highly effective in item-to-item (i2i) retrieval task and finds extensive applications in industrial-scale recommender systems. However, existing solutions towards computing Swing scores are either prohibitively expensive due to their quadratic time complexity w.r.t. the item degree, or rely on truncation heuristics that yield unsatisfactory quality, rendering them impractical particularly on graphs with billions of interactions. In this paper, we present ASC and $K$-ASC, two novel and efficient algorithms for approximate and top-$K$ Swing queries, to address the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, these algorithms provide rigorous theoretical guarantees in probabilistic relative and additive errors of Swing values. The basic idea of ASC is to combine two randomized algorithms, GNS and USS, in a simple yet non-trivial way to adaptively process high- and low-degree query items with minimal runtime cost. In particular, $K$-ASC offers practical efficiency and effectiveness for top-$K$ queries through a filter-refinement paradigm with carefully-designed heuristics. Extensive experiments over eight real datasets demonstrate that ASC and $K$-ASC can achieve orders of magnitude speed-up over competitors in terms of computational time while offering the same approximate and top-$K$ query result quality, and in particular, $K$-ASC is highly efficient on massive graphs including the billion-edge Yambda and MAG datasets.