Optimizing Recall or Relevance? A Multi-Task Multi-Head Approach for Item-to-Item Retrieval in Recommendation

The task of item-to-item (I2I) retrieval is to identify a set of relevant and highly engaging items based on a given trigger item. It is a crucial component in modern recommendation systems, where users' previously engaged items serve as trigger items to retrieve relevant content for future engagement. However, existing I2I retrieval models in industry are primarily built on co-engagement data and optimized using the recall measure, which overly emphasizes co-engagement patterns while failing to capture semantic relevance. This often leads to overfitting short-term co-engagement trends at the expense of long-term benefits such as discovering novel interests and promoting content diversity. To address this challenge, we propose MTMH, a Multi-Task and Multi-Head I2I retrieval model that achieves both high recall and semantic relevance. Our model consists of two key components: 1) a multi-task learning loss for formally optimizing the trade-off between recall and semantic relevance, and 2) a multi-head I2I retrieval architecture for retrieving both highly co-engaged and semantically relevant items. We evaluate MTMH using proprietary data from a commercial platform serving billions of users and demonstrate that it can improve recall by up to 14.4% and semantic relevance by up to 56.6% compared with prior state-of-the-art models. We also conduct live experiments to verify that MTMH can enhance both short-term consumption metrics and long-term user-experience-related metrics. Our work provides a principled approach for jointly optimizing I2I recall and semantic relevance, which has significant implications for improving the overall performance of recommendation systems.

Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries

Unified multimodal models aim to integrate understanding (text output) and generation (pixel output), but aligning these different modalities within a single architecture often demands complex training recipes and careful data balancing. We introduce MetaQueries, a set of learnable queries that act as an efficient interface between autoregressive multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models. MetaQueries connects the MLLM's latents to the diffusion decoder, enabling knowledge-augmented image generation by leveraging the MLLM's deep understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our method simplifies training, requiring only paired image-caption data and standard diffusion objectives. Notably, this transfer is effective even when the MLLM backbone remains frozen, thereby preserving its state-of-the-art multimodal understanding capabilities while achieving strong generative performance. Additionally, our method is flexible and can be easily instruction-tuned for advanced applications such as image editing and subject-driven generation.

CompCap: Improving Multimodal Large Language Models with Composite Captions

How well can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) understand composite images? Composite images (CIs) are synthetic visuals created by merging multiple visual elements, such as charts, posters, or screenshots, rather than being captured directly by a camera. While CIs are prevalent in real-world applications, recent MLLM developments have primarily focused on interpreting natural images (NIs). Our research reveals that current MLLMs face significant challenges in accurately understanding CIs, often struggling to extract information or perform complex reasoning based on these images. We find that existing training data for CIs are mostly formatted for question-answer tasks (e.g., in datasets like ChartQA and ScienceQA), while high-quality image-caption datasets, critical for robust vision-language alignment, are only available for NIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Composite Captions (CompCap), a flexible framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and automation tools to synthesize CIs with accurate and detailed captions. Using CompCap, we curate CompCap-118K, a dataset containing 118K image-caption pairs across six CI types. We validate the effectiveness of CompCap-118K by supervised fine-tuning MLLMs of three sizes: xGen-MM-inst.-4B and LLaVA-NeXT-Vicuna-7B/13B. Empirical results show that CompCap-118K significantly enhances MLLMs' understanding of CIs, yielding average gains of 1.7%, 2.0%, and 2.9% across eleven benchmarks, respectively.