Grevo: A Unified Generative Recommendation Framework with Evolutionary Item Indexing

Abstract

Generative recommendation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that reformulates retrieval as autoregressive generation over semantic identifiers (SIDs), achieving strong performance and drawing increasing attention as an alternative to matching. Despite this progress, SIDs are typically frozen by a content-based tokenizer before the recommender is trained, leaving a persistent gap between what best reconstructs an item's content and what a recommender can predict from user behavior. Recent end-to-end methods close this gap by jointly training the tokenizer and the recommender, but coupling the two destabilizes the identifier space and requires a second learnable model, alignment losses, and usually a delicate alternating-optimization schedule. To address this issue, we propose Grevo, a unified Generative recommendation framework with evolutionary item indexing, which treats the SID assignment itself as an evolvable discrete variable that adapts to behavioral feedback rather than as a tokenizer to be trained. Grevo builds on a single multitask recommender that unifies a behavioral SID generation task and a semantic SID grounding task, letting the recommender absorb the tokenizer's role. Through evolutionary item indexing, Grevo then uses the trained recommender itself as a posterior evaluator to reassign a budgeted set of high-risk identifiers under a fixed vocabulary and length. Together, these components turn index construction into a stable, feedback-driven search that requires no second learnable model, no alignment losses, and no alternating-optimization schedule. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that Grevo consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommendation methods.