QUEST: Efficient Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification with Large Language Models on Commodity Hardware

AbstractExtreme multi-label text classification (EMTC) involves predicting multiple labels from a vast pool of candidates based on a user’s textual query. While traditional BERT-based methods have shown limited success, large language models (LLMs) have brought new possibilities. It is promising to leverage their remarkable comprehension ability to understand textual queries. However, implementing LLMs is non-trivial for two main reasons. Firstly, real-world EMTC datasets can be extremely large, with candidate product pairs reaching up to ten million in real-world scenarios, which poses significant challenges in data ingestion. Secondly, the large size of LLMs makes computation and memory demands prohibitive for EMTC applications. To this end, we propose QUEST, a Quantized and Efficient Learning with Sampling Technique. QUEST includes a tailored hash sampling module that reduces the data volume to one-fourth of its original size. Additionally, we perform compressive fine-tuning LLMs with only twenty thousand trainable parameters, largely reducing computational requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QUEST outperforms existing methods while requiring fewer computational resources, unlocking efficient EMTC on commodity hardware such as a single Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU with 24 GB of memory.