Ducho: A Unified Framework for the Extraction of Multimodal Features in Recommendation

In multimodal-aware recommendation, the extraction of meaningful multimodal features is at the basis of high-quality recommendations. Generally, each recommendation framework implements its multimodal extraction procedures with specific strategies and tools. This is limiting for two reasons: (i) different extraction strategies do not ease the interdependence among multimodal recommendation frameworks; thus, they cannot be efficiently and fairly compared; (ii) given the large plethora of pre-trained deep learning models made available by different open source tools, model designers do not have access to shared interfaces to extract features. Motivated by the outlined aspects, we propose Ducho, a unified framework for the extraction of multimodal features in recommendation. By integrating three widely-adopted deep learning libraries as backends, namely, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Transformers, we provide a shared interface to extract and process features where each backend's specific methods are abstracted to the end user. Noteworthy, the extraction pipeline is easily configurable with a YAML-based file where the user can specify, for each modality, the list of models (and their specific backends/parameters) to perform the extraction. Finally, to make Ducho accessible to the community, we build a public Docker image equipped with a ready-to-use CUDA environment and propose three demos to test its functionalities for different scenarios and tasks. The GitHub repository and the documentation are accessible at this link: https://github.com/sisinflab/Ducho.