Research
NLP
Training with Low-precision Embedding Tables
December 3, 2018
Abstract
Starting from the success of Glove and Word2Vec in natural language processing, continuous representations are widely deployed in many other domain of applications. These applications span over encoding textual information to modeling user and items in recommender systems, using embedding vectors to represent a large number of objects. As the cardinality of the object sets increases, the embedding components quickly become the bottleneck in training memory footprint. In this work, we focus on building a system to train continuous embeddings in low precision floating point representation. Specifically, our system performs SGD-style model updates in single precision arithmetics, casts the updated parameters using stochastic rounding and stores the parameters in half-precision floating point. Theoretically, we prove that for strongly convex objectives, our SGD-based training algorithm retains the same convergence rate up to constants. We also present a system-friendly implementation for faster random number generator that increases runtime performance by 30%. We deploy our training system to deep neural networks with low precision embedding tables for recommender systems on top of both public dataset Criteo and an internal dataset at Facebook. We empirically demonstrate that our half-precision floating point training system can achieve generalization performance matching that of single precision training system, with up to 2X memory saving and 1.2X faster training speed.
AUTHORS
Related Publications
May 12, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
March 17, 2026
NLP
Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages
Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi
March 17, 2026
March 17, 2026
Speech & Audio
Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech
Omnilingual SONAR Team, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Jaehyeong Jo, Alexandre Mourachko, Yu-An Chung, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Christophe Ropers, David Dale, Holger Schwenk, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Loic Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot
March 17, 2026
February 27, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment
Yifu Qiu, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne
February 27, 2026
October 31, 2019
NLP
Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
March 14, 2019
NLP
On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research
Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin
March 14, 2019
January 13, 2020
NLP
Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research
Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert
January 13, 2020
April 30, 2018
NLP
Computer Vision
Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research
Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston
April 30, 2018
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026