IRLGMar 25

UniScale: Synergistic Entire Space Data and Model Scaling for Search Ranking

arXiv:2603.2422624.4h-index: 8
AI Analysis

This addresses performance bottlenecks in industrial search ranking systems, representing an incremental advance through synergistic data-architecture co-design.

The paper tackles the problem of diminishing returns from scaling model parameters alone in industrial search ranking systems by proposing UniScale, a co-design framework that jointly optimizes data and architecture. The result shows significant improvements in key business metrics on a large-scale e-commerce search platform, with clear scaling trends.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired a surge of scaling law research in industrial search, advertising, and recommendation systems. However, existing approaches focus mainly on architectural improvements, overlooking the critical synergy between data and architecture design. We observe that scaling model parameters alone exhibits diminishing returns, i.e., the marginal gain in performance steadily declines as model size increases, and that the performance degradation caused by complex heterogeneous data distributions is often irrecoverable through model design alone. In this paper, we propose UniScale to address these limitation, a novel co-design framework that jointly optimizes data and architecture to unlock the full potential of model scaling, which includes two core parts: (1) ES$^3$ (Entire-Space Sample System), a high-quality data scaling system that expands the training signal beyond conventional sampling strategies from both intra-domain request contexts with global supervised signal constructed by hierarchical label attribution and cross-domain samples aligning with the essence of user decision under similar content exposure environment in search domain; and (2) HHSFT (Heterogeneous Hierarchical Sample Fusion Transformer), a novel architecture designed to effectively model the complex heterogeneous distribution of scaled data and to harness the entire space user behavior data with Heterogeneous Hierarchical Feature Interaction and Entire Space User Interest Fusion, thereby surpassing the performance ceiling of structure-only model tuning. Extensive experiments on large-scale real world E-commerce search platform demonstrate that UniScale achieves significant improvements through the synergistic co-design of data and architecture and exhibits clear scaling trends, delivering substantial gains in key business metrics.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

Your Notes