The paper introduces the Controllable Retrieval Model (CRM), a retrieval framework that incorporates watch time as a controllable condition in recommendation systems. CRM learns to predict the next item based on observed watch time during training and can steer retrieval at inference by supplying a desired watch time without retraining. Implemented as both a DNN two‑tower model and a Decision Transformer, CRM allows item embeddings to remain precomputed for efficient ANN search and has been deployed in Kuaishou’s short‑video recommendation system, yielding measurable improvements in video watch time.
arXiv:2608.24079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A shared search-and-recommendation index must score new items from features alone because search has no exploration slot. In a public log covering bo...
arXiv:2607. 27692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Top-$K$ sparse attention reduces the cost of Softmax and value aggregation by attending to only a small subset of key--value (KV) entries.
arXiv:2609.37345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Streaming video understanding requires Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) to reason over continuous visual streams under causal constraints. As t...
arXiv:2607. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In modern recommendation systems, retrieval serves as a primary stage responsible for filtering billions of candidate items down to thousands prior to refined ranking.
The paper examines LLM-based recommendation rerankers that are often evaluated under an oracle protocol, which guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set. Across Amazon datasets, this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92–95% because realistic retrieval only covers 2–19% of relevant items at K=100, creating a recall ceiling that limits any closed-candidate reranker's top‑k NDCG. The authors find that various optimisation strategies—including prompt engineering, model scaling, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine‑tuning, hybrid retrieval, score‑aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion—do not significantly improve over a collaborative‑filtering baseline under realistic retrieval, and they propose a Recall‑Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP) to better assess rerankers in low‑recall regimes.
The paper introduces the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that iteratively refines a query embedding by selecting informative items and incorporating their content. ARR alternates between retrieval and query update, using stepwise contrastive supervision and reinforcement learning to optimize item selection and final ranking. Experiments show ARR outperforms baselines on in‑domain and zero‑shot benchmarks, with feedback improving both inference performance and initial query embeddings.
The paper investigates the trade‑off of using a shared search‑and‑recommendation index that scores new items purely from features, thereby keeping the index open to unseen items. Experiments on public logs show that a feature‑based tower can match warm‑item performance (Recall@20 0.9595 vs 0.9510) and a lexical baseline, while a full‑catalog check is inconclusive. The study also quantifies the cost of this openness on recommendation quality across several baselines, revealing that exact full‑softmax training improves recall but is impractical at catalog scale.
VEDJE is a new video-text retrieval method that compresses video features into a reusable cache while keeping them distinct for each frame. It introduces feature-change prediction as an auxiliary training signal, enabling improved retrieval from the compressed cache without extra cost at query time. Experiments on MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet show that VEDJE boosts R@1 in both retrieval directions, achieving 59.8% text-to-video R@1 on MSR-VTT with a fine-tuned VideoCLIP-XL first stage and maintaining recall when the per-video cache is reduced to 12 KiB.
arXiv:2606. 17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.
SPARE is a framework for streaming video understanding that adaptively retrieves historical evidence when recent observations are insufficient to answer a question. It uses a lightweight gate to decide when to fetch relevant past clips via a multimodal embedding model, and trains the system with LoRA instruction tuning to jointly use recent and retrieved context while abstaining when evidence is lacking. By sharing a visual encoder between understanding and retrieval branches and aligning features with linear adapters, SPARE achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on OVO‑Bench and StreamingBench, outperforming Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct by over 20 percentage points on OVO‑Bench and 14 on StreamingBench.
arXiv:2603.02561v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its quadratic co...
arXiv:2607. 17017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As scalability becomes increasingly important in recommendation modeling, recent architectures have advanced the modeling of two broad sources of ranking signals along separate paths: non-sequence features, including user, item, context, and cross features; and sequence features from user behavior histories.