Pengtao Zhang

Meituan LongCat Team, Anchun Gui, Bei Li et al.

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601, a 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) reasoning model with superior agentic reasoning capability. LongCat-Flash-Thinking-2601 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on a wide range of agentic benchmarks, including agentic search, agentic tool use, and tool-integrated reasoning. Beyond benchmark performance, the model demonstrates strong generalization to complex tool interactions and robust behavior under noisy real-world environments. Its advanced capability stems from a unified training framework that combines domain-parallel expert training with subsequent fusion, together with an end-to-end co-design of data construction, environments, algorithms, and infrastructure spanning from pre-training to post-training. In particular, the model's strong generalization capability in complex tool-use are driven by our in-depth exploration of environment scaling and principled task construction. To optimize long-tailed, skewed generation and multi-turn agentic interactions, and to enable stable training across over 10,000 environments spanning more than 20 domains, we systematically extend our asynchronous reinforcement learning framework, DORA, for stable and efficient large-scale multi-environment training. Furthermore, recognizing that real-world tasks are inherently noisy, we conduct a systematic analysis and decomposition of real-world noise patterns, and design targeted training procedures to explicitly incorporate such imperfections into the training process, resulting in improved robustness for real-world applications. To further enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks, we introduce a Heavy Thinking mode that enables effective test-time scaling by jointly expanding reasoning depth and width through intensive parallel thinking.

Pengtao Zhang, Zheng Zheng, Junlin Zhang

Click-Through Rate (CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and various deep models have been proposed. Some research has proved that FiBiNet is one of the best performance models and outperforms all other models on Avazu dataset. However, the large model size of FiBiNet hinders its wider application. In this paper, we propose a novel FiBiNet++ model to redesign FiBiNet's model structure, which greatly reduces model size while further improves its performance. One of the primary techniques involves our proposed "Low Rank Layer" focused on feature interaction, which serves as a crucial driver of achieving a superior compression ratio for models. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that FiBiNet++ effectively reduces non-embedding model parameters of FiBiNet by 12x to 16x on three datasets. On the other hand, FiBiNet++ leads to significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art CTR methods, including FiBiNet.

Pengtao Zhang, Junlin Zhang

New findings in natural language processing (NLP) demonstrate that the strong memorization capability contributes a lot to the success of Large Language Models (LLM). This inspires us to explicitly bring an independent memory mechanism into CTR ranking model to learn and memorize cross features' representations. In this paper, we propose multi-Hash Codebook NETwork (HCNet) as the memory mechanism for efficiently learning and memorizing representations of cross features in CTR tasks. HCNet uses a multi-hash codebook as the main memory place and the whole memory procedure consists of three phases: multi-hash addressing, memory restoring, and feature shrinking. We also propose a new CTR model named MemoNet which combines HCNet with a DNN backbone. Extensive experimental results on three public datasets and online test show that MemoNet reaches superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, MemoNet shows scaling law of large language model in NLP, which means we can enlarge the size of the codebook in HCNet to sustainably obtain performance gains. Our work demonstrates the importance and feasibility of learning and memorizing representations of cross features, which sheds light on a new promising research direction.

Zhiqiang Wang, Qingyun She, PengTao Zhang et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) estimation is a fundamental task in personalized advertising and recommender systems and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features.Inspired by the success of ELMO and Bert in NLP field, which dynamically refine word embedding according to the context sentence information where the word appears, we think it's also important to dynamically refine each feature's embedding layer by layer according to the context information contained in input instance in CTR estimation tasks. We can effectively capture the useful feature interactions for each feature in this way. In this paper, We propose a novel CTR Framework named ContextNet that implicitly models high-order feature interactions by dynamically refining each feature's embedding according to the input context. Specifically, ContextNet consists of two key components: contextual embedding module and ContextNet block. Contextual embedding module aggregates contextual information for each feature from input instance and ContextNet block maintains each feature's embedding layer by layer and dynamically refines its representation by merging contextual high-order interaction information into feature embedding. To make the framework specific, we also propose two models(ContextNet-PFFN and ContextNet-SFFN) under this framework by introducing linear contextual embedding network and two non-linear mapping sub-network in ContextNet block. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and the experiment results demonstrate that our proposed ContextNet-PFFN and ContextNet-SFFN model outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly.

Zhiqiang Wang, Qingyun She, PengTao Zhang et al.

Normalization has become one of the most fundamental components in many deep neural networks for machine learning tasks while deep neural network has also been widely used in CTR estimation field. Among most of the proposed deep neural network models, few model utilize normalization approaches. Though some works such as Deep & Cross Network (DCN) and Neural Factorization Machine (NFM) use Batch Normalization in MLP part of the structure, there isn't work to thoroughly explore the effect of the normalization on the DNN ranking systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the effect of widely used normalization schemas by applying the various normalization approaches to both feature embedding and MLP part in DNN model. Extensive experiments are conduct on three real-world datasets and the experiment results demonstrate that the correct normalization significantly enhances model's performance. We also propose a new and effective normalization approaches based on LayerNorm named variance only LayerNorm(VO-LN) in this work. A normalization enhanced DNN model named NormDNN is also proposed based on the above-mentioned observation. As for the reason why normalization works for DNN models in CTR estimation, we find that the variance of normalization plays the main role and give an explanation in this work.