arXiv Machine Learning

Target-Aware Early Stage Ranking

arXiv:2511. 21095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early Stage Ranking (ESR) in large-scale recommendation systems is dominated by ''user--item decoupling'' Two Tower architectures, which scale efficiently but cannot capture fine-grained, target-aware user--item interactions directly.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

From Language to Behavior: Scaling Sequence Transformers for Industrial Recommendation Ranking with Rec-Native Designs

The paper introduces ReST, a recommendation‑native Transformer scaling framework designed to handle noisy, irregular, and sparsely supervised user behavior sequences in production ranking. ReST employs a dual‑gated attention encoder with rotary positional and temporal embeddings, and a lightweight cross decoder that decouples heavy encoding from fast decoding, enabling efficient compute‑once, decode‑many‑times ranking. Experiments on industrial and public benchmarks show that ReST outperforms traditional Transformer blocks, achieving higher accuracy and consistent scaling across sequence length, depth, and width, and a one‑week online A/B test on a production advertising platform yielded a 1.31% AUC lift and an 11.93% increase in a core revenue metric within a 50 ms P99 latency budget.

By Jie Chen, Xiangqian Yu, Yanchao Lian, Tan Lu, Run Yang, Zhengchun Shang, Xing Wang, Cheng Chen, Ke Hu, Qiang Li, Tianjiu Yin, Xiaobing Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

SequenceO1: End-to-End Ultra-Long (100K) Sequence Modeling in Recommendation with Low-Rank Caching

SequenceO1 is an end‑to‑end framework that enables ultra‑long (up to 100K interactions) sequence modeling for recommendation systems. It compresses raw user histories into a fixed‑size sketch using Sketch Attention and then models short‑term and long‑term interests with Target‑to‑History Cross Attention. The system incorporates low‑rank caching, batching, pipeline lift, and a FlashSA kernel to keep training and inference efficient, achieving consistent offline and online performance gains when deployed at full traffic on Douyin.

By Lin Guan, Jia-Qi Yang, Zhishan Zhao, Jiaqi Huang, Hangyu Wang, Longbin Li, Beichuan Zhang, Haonan Jiang, Jinan Ni, Xiangyu Fan, Xiaowen Li, Ziyao Ren, Yuhang Qi, Xiaolong Zhu, Xuanyuan Luo, Qiwei Chen, Yi Cheng, Lele Yu
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

SOLAR: SVD-Optimized Lifelong Attention for Recommendation

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...

By Chenghao Zhang, Chao Feng, Yuanhao Pu, Xunyong Yang, Wenhui Yu, Xiang Li, Chunjie Chen, Kaiqiao Zhan
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Scaling Parameter and Context in Attention: Native Sparse Attention from Mixture-of-Head

The paper introduces NAMOH, a native sparse attention mechanism that activates only a subset of heads per token, allowing each head to attend to a limited subsequence of tokens. By scaling the number of heads while keeping the active heads per token fixed, the method shortens head histories and reduces key‑value access without increasing overall storage. Experiments demonstrate that NAMOH can outperform fully activated models with the same parameter count and enable more efficient long‑context inference than smaller dense models.

By Zizhuo Fu, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

UniPinRec: Unifying Generative Retrieval and Ranking at Pinterest Scale

arXiv:2606. 00422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems predominantly train retrieval and ranking as separate models despite both increasingly relying on large transformers encoding the same user behavior data, duplicating parameters, compute, and serving cost.

By Hanyu Li, Yi-Ping Hsu, Aditya Mantha, Prabhat Agarwal, Laksh Bhasin, Jialu Wang, Hongtao Lin, Bella Huang, Yaxin Li, Xinyi Li, Chuxi Wang, Kousik Rajesh, Hooshmand Shokri Razaghi, Shunyao Li, Zongyue Qin, Jaewon Yang, James Li, Dhruvil Deven Badani, Jiajing Xu, Charles Rosenberg
arXiv AI
Jun 30

CMSL: Constructive Multi-Sequence Learning for Recommendation Systems

arXiv:2606. 28533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequence learning has emerged as the promising paradigm in recommendation systems, surpassing traditional Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) by capturing the temporal nuances of user behavior.

By Zikun Cui, Renzhi Wu, Junjie Yang, Li Sheng, Jijie Wei, Linfeng Liu, Tai Guo, Tao Jia, Xiaodong Wang, Hong Li, Li Yu, Sri Reddy, Hong Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.

By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 21

WHALE: A Scalable Unified Model for Recommendation with Wukong-HSTU Architecture

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.

By Renqin Cai, Dawei Sun, Yuanjun Yao, Zhiyong Wang, Velvin Fu, Maggie Zhuang, Yu Shi, Zhongnan Fang, Xuan Cao, Jing Qian, Rui Li