Shixiong Zhao

Seed, Baisheng Li, Banggu Wu et al.

We introduce Virtual Width Networks (VWN), a framework that delivers the benefits of wider representations without incurring the quadratic cost of increasing the hidden size. VWN decouples representational width from backbone width, expanding the embedding space while keeping backbone compute nearly constant. In our large-scale experiment, an 8-times expansion accelerates optimization by over 2 times for next-token and 3 times for next-2-token prediction. The advantage amplifies over training as both the loss gap grows and the convergence-speedup ratio increases, showing that VWN is not only token-efficient but also increasingly effective with scale. Moreover, we identify an approximately log-linear scaling relation between virtual width and loss reduction, offering an initial empirical basis and motivation for exploring virtual-width scaling as a new dimension of large-model efficiency.

Wenhao Li, Jie Zhou, Chuan Luo et al.

In the realm of modern mobile E-commerce, providing users with nearby commercial service recommendations through location-based online services has become increasingly vital. While machine learning approaches have shown promise in multi-scene recommendation, existing methodologies often struggle to address cold-start problems in unprecedented scenes: the increasing diversity of commercial choices, along with the short online lifespan of scenes, give rise to the complexity of effective recommendations in online and dynamic scenes. In this work, we propose Scene-wise Adaptive Network (SwAN), a novel approach that emphasizes high-performance cold-start online recommendations for new scenes. Our approach introduces several crucial capabilities, including scene similarity learning, user-specific scene transition cognition, scene-specific information construction for the new scene, and enhancing the diverged logical information between scenes. We demonstrate SwAN's potential to optimize dynamic multi-scene recommendation problems by effectively online handling cold-start recommendations for any newly arrived scenes. More encouragingly, SwAN has been successfully deployed in Meituan's online catering recommendation service, which serves millions of customers per day, and SwAN has achieved a 5.64% CTR index improvement relative to the baselines and a 5.19% increase in daily order volume proportion.