We present Merged-Averaged Classifiers via Hashing (MACH) for Kclassification with large K. Compared to traditional one-vs-all classifiers that require O(Kd) memory and inference cost, MACH only need O(d log K) memory while only requiring O(K log K +d log K) operation for inference. MACH is the first generic K-classification algorithm, with provably theoretical guarantees, which requires O(log K) memory without any assumption on the relationship between classes. MACH uses universal hashing to reduce classification with a large number of classes to few independent classification task with small (constant) number of classes. We provide theoretical quantification of accuracy-memory tradeoff by showing the first connection between extreme classification and heavy hitters. With MACH we can train ODP dataset with 100,000 classes and 400,000 features on a single Titan X GPU (12GB), with the classification accuracy of 19.28%, which is the best-reported accuracy on this dataset. Before this work, the best performing baseline is a one-vs-all classifier that requires 40 billion parameters (160 GB model size) and achieves 9% accuracy. In contrast, MACH can achieve 9% accuracy with 480x reduction in the model size (of mere 0.3GB). With MACH, we also demonstrate complete training of fine-grained imagenet dataset (compressed size 104GB), with 21,000 classes, on a single GPU.
Thanks to the authors for their feedback.
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The paper presents a method for classification scheme for problems involving large number of classes in multi-class setting. This is related to the theme of extreme classification but the setting is restricted to that of multi-class classification instead of multi-label classification. The training process involves data transformation using R hash functions, and then learning R classifiers. During prediction the probability of a test instance belonging to a class is given by the sum of the probabilities assigned by the R meta-classifiers to the meta-class in the which the given class label falls. The paper demonstrates better results on ODP and Imagenet-21K datasets compared to LOMTree, RecallTree and OAA.
There are following concerns regarding the paper which don't seem to be adequately addressed :
 
 - The paper seems to propose a method in which two-step trees are being constructed based on random binning of labels, such that the first level has B nodes. It is not intuitively clear why such a method could be better in terms of prediction accuracy than OAA. The authors mention algorithms for training and prediction, and go on to mention that the method performs better than OAA. Also, please refer to point 2 below.
 - The paper repeatedly mentions that OAA has O(Kd) storage and prediction complexity. This is however not entirely true due to sparsity of training data, and the model. These statements seem quite misleading especially in the context of text datasets such as ODP. The authors are requested to check the papers [1] and [2], in which it is shown that OAA can perform surprisingly well. Also, exploiting the sparsity in the data/models, actual model sizes for WikiLSHTC-325K from [3] can be reduced from around 900GB to less than 10GB with weight pruning, and sparsity inducing regularizers. It is not clear if the 160GB model size reported for ODP took the above suggestions into considerations, and which kind of regularization was used. Was the solver used from vowpal wabbit or packages such as Liblinear were used for reporting OAA results.
 - Lack of empirical comparison - The paper lacks empirical comparisons especially on large-scale multi-class LSHTC-1/2/3 datasets [4] on which many approaches have been proposed. For a fair comparison, the proposed method must be compared against these datasets. It would be important to clarify if the method can be used on multi-label datasets or not, if so, it needs to be evaluated on the XML datasets [3].
[1] PPDSparse - http://www.kdd.org/kdd2017/papers/view/a-parallel-and-primal-dual-sparse-method-for-extreme-classification
[2] DiSMEC - https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02521
[3] http://manikvarma.org/downloads/XC/XMLRepository.html
[4] http://lshtc.iit.demokritos.gr/LSHTC2_CFP