ShuffleGate: Scalable Feature Optimization for Recommender Systems via Batch-wise Sensitivity Learning
About
Feature optimization -- specifically Feature Selection (FS) and Dimension Selection (DS) -- is critical for the efficiency and generalization of large-scale recommender systems. While conceptually related, these tasks are typically tackled with isolated solutions that often suffer from ambiguous importance scores or prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we propose ShuffleGate, a unified and interpretable mechanism that estimates component importance by measuring the model's sensitivity to information loss. Unlike conventional gating that learns relative weights, ShuffleGate introduces a batch-wise shuffling strategy to effectively "erase" information in an end-to-end differentiable manner. This paradigm shift yields naturally polarized importance distributions, bridging the long-standing "search-retrain gap" and distinguishing essential signals from noise without complex threshold tuning. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks validate that ShuffleGate consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Feature and Dimension Selection tasks. It achieves a 15\times speedup over permutation baselines and demonstrates extreme scalability by processing 270M parameters in just 700 seconds. Finally, in a top-tier industrial deployment, it compressed input dimensions by 10\times, yielding a 91% increase in training throughput while serving billions of daily requests without performance degradation.