MISO: Model-Internal-State-Guided Optimization for Ranking Models
Ranking models are repeatedly refined within established model families, yet the choice of which component to scale, replace, or retire is often guided by expensive trial-and-error. We present Model Internal State Optimization (MISO), a systems workflow that uses model internal states (MIS), including parameters, activations, gradients, and normalization statistics, to prioritize such local optimization decisions. MISO extracts MIS from a trained ranking model, aggregates them into ranking, alignment, and comparison signals, and converts those signals into a small set of interpretable candidate edits. Because MIS are re-extracted after each retraining cycle, MISO naturally supports an adaptive optimization workflow that tracks evolving model behavior as data distributions and system requirements shift over time. In an ads ranking case study, MISO improves normalized entropy while requiring substantially fewer validation runs than expert-driven and black-box scaling workflows, offering a practical middle ground between manual tuning and opaque automated search.