SparseLift: Automatically Optimizing Opaque Sparse Paths in Industrial-Scale Recommendation Model Training

Abstract

The sparse path, comprising sparse operations and collective communication, is a critical component of large-scale recommendation models. However, these operations are often represented as opaque nodes in the training computation graph, hindering whole-graph optimization. We present SparseLift, a low-overhead compiler for the sparse path of large-scale recommendation training. It exposes sparse computation and communication to whole-graph analysis to expand the optimization space and improve training efficiency. By analyzing model structure and runtime information, SparseLift reconstructs opaque nodes as analyzable subgraphs, recovering the resource semantics of sparse computation and communication within the graph. Building on the recovered semantics, we design incremental cost models and a constraint-aware planner to automatically select and organize subgraph optimizations into an execution plan that is reused during subsequent steady-state training. We evaluate SparseLift on an industrial video-platform recommendation task with 100B sparse parameters and the public DLRM benchmark. SparseLift improves steady-state throughput for ordinary industrial training steps by 16.5\% over the native baseline. On DLRM, it achieves $1.60\times$ and $1.26\times$ model-execution speedups over DLRM-Baseline and TorchRec, respectively.