Industrial recommender systems commonly use cascaded retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking pipelines. Although efficient, these pipelines fragment information and objectives across modules, rely on rigid rules, and have limited awareness of real-time intent, leaving session-level shifts among browsing, comparison, and purchase insufficiently addressed. We present DREAM (Developing Recommender Engine with Agentic Methods), an autonomous optimization control architecture that adds a perception-aware, orchestrable, and auditable policy layer atop existing pipelines without replacing them. DREAM has two core components. First, a three-tier Intent Engine fuses on-device signals into structured L0/L1/L2 intent representations; its edge-cloud trigger chain reduces reporting volume to approximately 8.7%. Second, a Meta Engine uses a MetaModel for layered M1-to-M2-to-M3 reasoning: intent summarization, strategy planning informed by Strategy Memory, and parameter translation. It dispatches the resulting parameters through a unified outlet with safety guardrails. A Reward Dual Loop continuously optimizes both components by combining offline simulation for strategy-space exploration with online feedback for outcome calibration, forming a cycle of generation, execution, evaluation, and experience accumulation. Large-scale A/B tests on Taobao's homepage feed show that re-ranking control alone improves IPV by 2.06%, Core IPV by 2.39%, and GMV by 0.88%. Extending control to fine ranking raises these gains to 2.71%, 3.06%, and 1.31%, respectively, while consistently improving PV by more than 1%. These gains require neither replacement of pipeline models nor compromise of serving stability, supporting agentic meta-control as a viable paradigm for industrial recommendation.
Bin Zhang, Bowen Zheng, Chao Yi et al.· 0 citations
Sequential recommenders are commonly trained with one-hot next-item labels under a causal (prefix-only) objective aligned with inference. While deployment-compatible, this supervision offers little insight into relative preferences among non-target items. Yet logged interaction sequences contain an additional supervisory source: interactions following the target often reveal how user intent evolves, making the target easier to interpret. We treat these future interactions as training-only privileged information, available during learning but not at inference. This raises a natural question: can future interactions provide richer supervision while keeping training aligned with inference-time prediction? We propose Privileged Self-Distillation (PSD), a framework that separates learning-time information from inference-time information. PSD applies two attention masks to the same backbone: a future-aware view yields a privileged teacher distribution conditioned on past and future interactions, while a prefix-only view yields the student distribution used for deployment. Distilling the privileged distribution converts future interactions into training-only supervision rather than inference-time inputs. Since both views share a backbone, the teacher's advantage is purely informational, not architectural, removing the need for a separately pretrained teacher and letting its supervision adapt as the student evolves. PSD further uses an advantage-reachability gate to focus distillation on teacher signals likely supported by the observed prefix, along with a momentum-averaged teacher for stable targets. The framework is optimized end-to-end in a single stage, leaving the deployed model and inference cost unchanged. Experiments across public benchmarks and diverse backbones show consistent improvements.
Jiakai Tang, Yang Zhang, See-Kiong Ng et al.· 0 citations
Applying scaling laws to recommendation retrieval is hindered by feature heterogeneity: naively stacking Transformer layers yields diminishing returns because heterogeneous fields produce severe token-norm divergence. We present TransRetrieval, a Transformer-based retrieval framework that scales with both computational budget and cross-domain data. The key enabler is (1) weighted average aggregation, which restores the homogeneous-token assumption Transformers rely on. Building on this, we introduce (2) target token compression that cuts per-candidate FLOPs by 85% while preserving cross-attention expressiveness, and (3) position-style domain embeddings that unify multiple domains at negligible additional cost, turning cross-domain data into a scaling asset. On a 40-billion-interaction industrial dataset and the public KuaiRand benchmark, scaling compute from 0.1 to 2 MFLOPs per target yields +19.3/+22.2 pt Recall@2000, confirming robust log-linear scaling. In online A/B tests, TransRetrieval lifts platform revenue by 2.53% under the same end-to-end latency constraint as the production baseline.
Zhi-Fei Zheng, Yunfei Liu, Bin Liu et al.· 0 citations
RecGPT-V3 is presented, a stateful, hybrid-modal recommender that reasons over natural language for open-world knowledge and Semantic IDs (SIDs) for concrete item grounding and achieves consistent gains in large-scale online A/B tests.
RecVerse is presented, a GUI-grounded simulation agent that perceives pages through screenshots and produces faithful multi-turn trajectories and significantly outperforms existing baselines in both behavioral fidelity and intent consistency.