Kuo Cai

OneRec Team, Biao Yang, Boyang Ding et al.

Generative recommendation models in the OneRec family have been widely deployed in many real-world services, such as short-video, live-streaming, advertising, and e-commerce. However, these generative models can only benefit from the scaling advantage, while their reasoning ability is hard to activate, since we cannot construct meaningful Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sequences consisting of itemic tokens only. Inspired by the success of the reasoning-style ``think before answer'' paradigm in the LLM field, we conduct preliminary studies (i.e., OneRec-Think, OpenOneRec) to explore reasoning capability in generative recommendation. Nevertheless, we notice an unexpected phenomenon: the thinking mode does not show advantages over the non-thinking mode. Drawing insights from recent findings on CoT robustness in multi-modal language models, we argue that effective reasoning in recommendation rests on two factors: perception, the ability to ground itemic tokens in their underlying language semantics, and cognition, the ability to reorganize a user's behavior sequence into coherent latent interest points. We therefore propose OneReason, which includes: (1) strong itemic token perception in pre-training, (2) a three-level cognition-enhanced CoT format for recommendation tasks in SFT, and (3) a specialize-then-unify training recipe in RL to enhance the thinking ability.

Zhipeng Wei, Kuo Cai, Junda She et al.

Local life service is a vital scenario in Kuaishou App, where video recommendation is intrinsically linked with store's location information. Thus, recommendation in our scenario is challenging because we should take into account user's interest and real-time location at the same time. In the face of such complex scenarios, end-to-end generative recommendation has emerged as a new paradigm, such as OneRec in the short video scenario, OneSug in the search scenario, and EGA in the advertising scenario. However, in local life service, an end-to-end generative recommendation model has not yet been developed as there are some key challenges to be solved. The first challenge is how to make full use of geographic information. The second challenge is how to balance multiple objectives, including user interests, the distance between user and stores, and some other business objectives. To address the challenges, we propose OneLoc. Specifically, we leverage geographic information from different perspectives: (1) geo-aware semantic ID incorporates both video and geographic information for tokenization, (2) geo-aware self-attention in the encoder leverages both video location similarity and user's real-time location, and (3) neighbor-aware prompt captures rich context information surrounding users for generation. To balance multiple objectives, we use reinforcement learning and propose two reward functions, i.e., geographic reward and GMV reward. With the above design, OneLoc achieves outstanding offline and online performance. In fact, OneLoc has been deployed in local life service of Kuaishou App. It serves 400 million active users daily, achieving 21.016% and 17.891% improvements in terms of gross merchandise value (GMV) and orders numbers.

Chengcheng Guo, Junda She, Kuo Cai et al.

Large-scale industrial recommendation systems typically employ a two-stage paradigm of retrieval and ranking to handle huge amounts of information. Recent research focuses on improving the performance of retrieval model. A promising way is to introduce extensive information about users and items. On one hand, lifelong sequential behavior is valuable. Existing lifelong behavior modeling methods in ranking stage focus on the interaction of lifelong behavior and candidate items from retrieval stage. In retrieval stage, it is difficult to utilize lifelong behavior because of a large corpus of candidate items. On the other hand, existing retrieval methods mostly relay on interaction information, potentially disregarding valuable multi-modal information. To solve these problems, we represent the pioneering exploration of leveraging multi-modal information and lifelong sequence model within the advanced tree-based retrieval model. We propose Multi-modal Indexing and Searching with lifelong Sequence (MISS), which contains a multi-modal index tree and a multi-modal lifelong sequence modeling module. Specifically, for better index structure, we propose multi-modal index tree, which is built using the multi-modal embedding to precisely represent item similarity. To precisely capture diverse user interests in user lifelong sequence, we propose collaborative general search unit (Co-GSU) and multi-modal general search unit (MM-GSU) for multi-perspective interests searching.

Chi Liu, Jiangxia Cao, Rui Huang et al.

Recommendation systems (RecSys) are designed to connect users with relevant items from a vast pool of candidates while aligning with the business goals of the platform. A typical industrial RecSys is composed of two main stages, retrieval and ranking: (1) the retrieval stage aims at searching hundreds of item candidates satisfied user interests; (2) based on the retrieved items, the ranking stage aims at selecting the best dozen items by multiple targets estimation for each item candidate, including classification and regression targets. Compared with ranking model, the retrieval model absence of item candidate information during inference, therefore retrieval models are often trained by classification target only (e.g., click-through rate), but failed to incorporate regression target (e.g., the expected watch-time), which limit the effectiveness of retrieval. In this paper, we propose the Controllable Retrieval Model (CRM), which integrates regression information as conditional features into the two-tower retrieval paradigm. This modification enables the retrieval stage could fulfill the target gap with ranking model, enhancing the retrieval model ability to search item candidates satisfied the user interests and condition effectively. We validate the effectiveness of CRM through real-world A/B testing and demonstrate its successful deployment in Kuaishou short-video recommendation system, which serves over 400 million users.