From Language to Behavior: Scaling Sequence Transformers for Industrial Recommendation Ranking with Rec-Native Designs

arXiv:2609.01240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling Transformers has driven large gains in language modeling, but transplanting this to behavior-sequence modeling in production ranking is challenging: recommendation differs in signal quality, where behavior sequences are noisy, temporally irregular, and sparsely supervised, and in computation asymmetry, where each request scores many candidates against one shared user history under tight latency budgets. We propose ReST, a recommendation-native Transformer scaling framework. For signal quality, it introduces a sequence encoder with dual-gated attention, rotary positional and temporal embedding, stabilized residual normalization, and training-only auxiliary objectives. For computation asymmetry, it factorizes ranking into a heavy reusable encoder and a lightweight cross decoder with projection-free KV attention and token-specific parameterization, coupling user-level shared-prefix training with shared-prefix serving for compute-once, decode-many-times ranking. Across industrial and public benchmarks, ReST achieves higher accuracy and scales more consistently along sequence length, depth, and width, where LLM-style Transformer blocks saturate. A one-week online A/B test on a production advertising platform improves online AUC by 1.31% and lifts a core revenue metric by 11.93% within a 50 ms P99 budget; ReST has since been fully deployed in production, showing that behavior-sequence scaling remains a promising, under-exploited axis for production ranking.

Abstract:Scaling Transformers has driven large gains in language modeling, but transplanting this to behavior-sequence modeling in production ranking is challenging: recommendation differs in signal quality, where behavior sequences are noisy, temporally irregular, and sparsely supervised, and in computation asymmetry, where each request scores many candidates against one shared user history under tight latency budgets. We propose ReST, a recommendation-native Transformer scaling framework. For signal quality, it introduces a sequence encoder with dual-gated attention, rotary positional and temporal embedding, stabilized residual normalization, and training-only auxiliary objectives. For computation asymmetry, it factorizes ranking into a heavy reusable encoder and a lightweight cross decoder with projection-free KV attention and token-specific parameterization, coupling user-level shared-prefix training with shared-prefix serving for compute-once, decode-many-times ranking. Across industrial and public benchmarks, ReST achieves higher accuracy and scales more consistently along sequence length, depth, and width, where LLM-style Transformer blocks saturate. A one-week online A/B test on a production advertising platform improves online AUC by 1.31% and lifts a core revenue metric by 11.93% within a 50 ms P99 budget; ReST has since been fully deployed in production, showing that behavior-sequence scaling remains a promising, under-exploited axis for production ranking.

Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.01240 [cs.IR]

(or arXiv:2609.01240v1 [cs.IR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01240 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

aiqbench analysis

From Language to Behavior: Scaling Sequence Transformers for Industrial Recommendation Ranking with Rec-Native Designs

Related coverage