Beyond Static Collision Handling: Adaptive Semantic ID Learning for Multimodal Recommendation at Industrial Scale

TL;DR

AdaSID introduces an adaptive learning framework for semantic IDs in recommendation systems, balancing collision suppression and semantic sharing to improve retrieval accuracy and diversity at scale.

Contribution

It proposes a novel adaptive regulation method for semantic ID overlaps that dynamically balances collision handling and recommendation alignment.

Findings

Improves Recall and NDCG by about 4.5% on public benchmarks.

Enhances codebook utilization and SID diversity.

Achieves a 0.98% GMV increase in online e-commerce A/B testing.

Abstract

Modern recommendation systems involve massive catalogs of multimodal items, where scalable item identification must balance compactness, semantic fidelity, and downstream effectiveness. Semantic IDs (SIDs) address this need by representing items as short discrete token sequences derived from multimodal signals, providing a compact interface for retrieval, ranking, and generative recommendation. However, effective SID learning is hindered by collisions, where different items are assigned identical or highly confusable codes. Existing methods mainly rely on improved quantization or fixed overlap regularization, but they do not adaptively distinguish whether an overlap should be suppressed or preserved. We propose AdaSID, an adaptive semantic ID learning framework for recommendation. AdaSID regulates SID overlaps through a two-stage process. First, it relaxes repulsion for observed overlaps when the involved items are semantically compatible, preserving admissible sharing rather than uniformly separating all collisions. Second, it allocates the remaining regulation pressure according to local collision load and training progress, strengthening control in congested regions while gradually rebalancing optimization toward recommendation alignment. This design adaptively decides which overlaps to penalize, how strongly to regulate them, and when to shift the learning focus. Extensive offline and online experiments validate AdaSID. On two public benchmarks, AdaSID improves Recall and NDCG by about 4.5% on average over strong baselines, while improving codebook utilization and SID diversity. In Kuaishou e-commerce, an online A/B test on short-video retrieval covering tens of millions of users achieves statistically significant gains, including a 0.98% GMV improvement, and industrial ranking evaluation shows consistent AUC improvements.