HiGR: Efficient Generative Slate Recommendation via Hierarchical Planning and Multi-Objective Preference Alignment

TL;DR

HiGR is a hierarchical generative framework for slate recommendation that improves efficiency and alignment with user preferences, leading to better recommendation quality and faster inference in industrial settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel hierarchical planning and preference alignment approach for generative slate recommendation, addressing entangled tokenization and decoding inefficiencies.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in offline quality

Achieves a 5x inference speedup

Increases user engagement metrics in online deployment

Abstract

Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. Recent advances in generative models have shown significant potential for this task via autoregressive modeling of discrete semantic ID sequences. However, existing methods suffer from three key limitations: entangled item tokenization, inefficient sequential decoding, and the absence of holistic slate planning. These issues often result in substantial inference overhead and inadequate alignment with diverse user preferences and practical business requirements, hindering the industrial deployment of generative slate recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an efficient generative slate recommendation framework that integrates hierarchical planning with listwise preference alignment. First, we design an auto-encoder incorporating residual quantization and contrastive constraints, which tokenizes items into semantically structured IDs to enable controllable generation. Second, HiGR decouples the generation process into two stages: a list-level planning stage to capture global slate intent, and an item-level decoding stage to select specific items, effectively reducing the search space and enabling efficient generation. Third, we introduce a multi-objective and listwise preference alignment mechanism that enhances slate quality by leveraging implicit user feedback. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our HiGR method. Notably, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10\% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a $5\times$ inference speedup. Furthermore, we have deployed HiGR on a commercial platform under Tencent (serving hundreds of millions of users), and online A/B tests show that it increases average watch time and average video plays by 1.22\% and 1.73\%, respectively.