Generative Recommendation for Large-Scale Advertising

TL;DR

GR4AD is a production-oriented generative recommender system for large-scale advertising, combining novel tokenization, efficient decoding, and value-aware optimization to improve revenue and scalability.

Contribution

The paper introduces GR4AD, a comprehensive generative recommendation framework tailored for large-scale advertising, with innovations in tokenization, decoding, and online optimization.

Findings

Achieved up to 4.2% ad revenue increase in large-scale online tests.

Deployed in Kuaishou's advertising system with over 400 million users.

Demonstrated effective scaling and real-time inference with reduced costs.

Abstract

Generative recommendation has recently attracted widespread attention in industry due to its potential for scaling and stronger model capacity. However, deploying real-time generative recommendation in large-scale advertising requires designs beyond large-language-model (LLM)-style training and serving recipes. We present a production-oriented generative recommender co-designed across architecture, learning, and serving, named GR4AD (Generative Recommendation for ADdvertising). As for tokenization, GR4AD proposes UA-SID (Unified Advertisement Semantic ID) to capture complicated business information. Furthermore, GR4AD introduces LazyAR, a lazy autoregressive decoder that relaxes layer-wise dependencies for short, multi-candidate generation, preserving effectiveness while reducing inference cost, which facilitates scaling under fixed serving budgets. To align optimization with business value, GR4AD employs VSL (Value-Aware Supervised Learning) and proposes RSPO (Ranking-Guided Softmax Preference Optimization), a ranking-aware, list-wise reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes value-based rewards under list-level metrics for continual online updates. For online inference, we further propose dynamic beam serving, which adapts beam width across generation levels and online load to control compute. Large-scale online A/B tests show up to 4.2% ad revenue improvement over an existing DLRM-based stack, with consistent gains from both model scaling and inference-time scaling. GR4AD has been fully deployed in Kuaishou advertising system with over 400 million users and achieves high-throughput real-time serving.