FORGE: Forming Semantic Identifiers for Generative Retrieval in Industrial Datasets
For practitioners of generative retrieval in industrial recommendation systems, FORGE offers practical SID construction strategies and evaluation metrics, though the performance gain is incremental.
FORGE provides a taxonomy and benchmark for constructing semantic identifiers (SIDs) for generative retrieval in recommendation, achieving a 0.35% increase in transaction count in Taobao's online A/B tests. It also proposes two novel SID evaluation metrics that correlate with recommendation performance without requiring full GR training.
Semantic identifiers (SIDs) have gained increasing attention in generative retrieval (GR) for recommendation due to their meaningful semantic discriminability. However, current studies in this field primarily (1) offer limited investigation into the construction strategies for better SIDs, and (2) their SID assessment typically relies on costly GR training. To address these challenges, we propose FORGE, a comprehensive benchmark for FOrming semantic identifieRs for Generative rEtrieval. Specifically, FORGE provides a taxonomy of the SID construction process from several perspectives and validates their impact on downstream GR through offline experiments across diverse settings. Notably, these empirical findings have led to a 0.35% increase in transaction count via online A/B experiments in the Guess You Like section of Taobao. The corresponding SID construction strategies have since been deployed at full scale on Taobao, demonstrating their practical effectiveness. To avoid expensive SID assessment that requires full GR training, we propose two novel SID evaluation metrics that are highly correlated with recommendation performance, enabling convenient evaluations without any GR training. Furthermore, to facilitate the community, we release AL-GR, the industrial dataset used in our experiments, comprising 14 billion interactions and 250 million items with the corresponding multimodal features collected from Taobao. All the code and data are available at https://github.com/selous123/al_sid.