TSGR: Taobao Search Generative Retrieval
For industrial e-commerce search, TSGR provides a practical solution to incorporate business value into generative retrieval, improving both retrieval accuracy and downstream business metrics.
TSGR addresses the insensitivity of generative retrieval to item business value in Taobao Search by introducing query-aware SID construction and a value-aware ranking module, achieving 9.16% improvement in HR@1000 offline and online gains of +0.43% IPV, +1.12% Transaction Count, and +1.64% GMV.
Generative retrieval (GR) has demonstrated strong promise for industrial e-commerce search by training a single autoregressive model to directly generate the Semantic IDs (SIDs) of target items. However, existing GR systems are primarily optimized for semantic matching and remain insensitive to item business value: SID construction is value-unaware, and candidates are ranked without access to item side-info. Consequently, high-value items are often missed or deprioritized at the retrieval stage, limiting downstream business impact. This limitation is particularly critical in industrial settings such as Taobao Search, where business objectives are central to system design. To address this, we propose $\textbf{T}$aobao $\textbf{S}$earch $\textbf{G}$enerative $\textbf{R}$etrieval ($\textbf{TSGR}$), a unified generative retrieval framework that incorporates value awareness into both item representation and candidate ranking. 1) For item representation, TSGR introduces $\textbf{Query-aware Parallel SID (QP-SID)}$, which encodes query-conditioned value orderings into the SID construction by building parallel codebooks derived from query-item statistics, so that higher-value and query-relevant items are assigned better token indices. 2) For candidate ranking, we introduce a $\textbf{Value-aware Ranking Module (VRM)}$ that is built upon and jointly optimized with the GR, enabling a single model to seamlessly serve as both retriever and pre-ranker without a dedicated pre-ranking stage. A progressive training pipeline further aligns the model with semantic relevance, user preferences, and business objectives. Offline experiments show that TSGR achieves an 9.16% improvement in HR@1000, and online A/B tests further validate its effectiveness, yielding gains of +0.43% in IPV, +1.12% in Transaction Count, and +1.64% in GMV.