Mamba for Scalable and Efficient Personalized Recommendations

Abstract: In this effort, we propose using the Mamba for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. We present the \textit{FT-Mamba} (Feature Tokenizer\,$+$\,Mamba), a novel hybrid model that replaces Transformer layers with Mamba layers within the FT-Transformer architecture, for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. The \textit{Mamba model} offers an efficient alternative to Transformers, reducing computational complexity from quadratic to linear by enhancing the capabilities of State Space Models (SSMs). FT-Mamba is designed to improve the scalability and efficiency of recommendation systems while maintaining performance. We evaluate FT-Mamba in comparison to a traditional Transformer-based model within a Two-Tower architecture on three datasets: Spotify music recommendation, H&M fashion recommendation, and vaccine messaging recommendation. Each model is trained on 160,000 user-action pairs, and performance is measured using precision (P), recall (R), Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and Hit Ratio (HR) at several truncation values. Our results demonstrate that FT-Mamba outperforms the Transformer-based model in terms of computational efficiency while maintaining or exceeding performance across key recommendation metrics. By leveraging Mamba layers, FT-Mamba provides a scalable and effective solution for large-scale personalized recommendation systems, showcasing the potential of the Mamba architecture to enhance both efficiency and accuracy.