Kuaishou Technology
Abstract:Generative recommendation benefits from reasoning-enhanced inference, and latent reasoning offers an efficient paradigm by encoding intermediate reasoning processes into compact continuous representations for latency-sensitive deployment. Despite its efficiency, existing latent reasoning approaches typically rely on directly distilling raw chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories into latent representations, assuming that textual reasoning traces provide sufficient supervision. However, recommendation reasoning trajectories contain diverse reasoning processes with redundant expressions and unstable reasoning paths, making raw CoT supervision suboptimal for learning transferable latent reasoning representations. To address this challenge, we propose EvoReason, a self-evolving latent reasoning framework that adaptively aligns explicit reasoning supervision with the student's latent reasoning space through primitive-guided on-policy distillation. First, EvoReason extracts reusable reasoning primitives from high-quality agentic recommendation trajectories, where each primitive captures an essential reasoning behavior and serves as a pseudo-tool for structured teacher reasoning. Then, based on these primitives, we equip the teacher with primitive-aware reasoning capabilities, enabling it to generate structured CoT supervision with reduced redundancy and improved consistency. Finally, during latent reasoning optimization, EvoReason introduces a self-evolving on-policy distillation mechanism, where the primitive-guided reasoning process evolves according to the student's latent reasoning outcomes. Through this closed-loop co-evolution, policy updates continuously improve latent reasoning behaviors is refined according to the resulting latent reasoning outcomes, enabling progressively better-aligned CoT supervision and more effective reasoning transfer.
Abstract:While large language models (LLMs) have advanced ID-based recommendation through Semantic ID (SID) modeling, existing SID generation frameworks largely follow a single-representation-then-quantization paradigm. This design faces two bottlenecks: semantic entanglement mixes heterogeneous attributes, such as geography, brand, and category, causing information loss during quantization, low-quality SIDs, and severe collisions; moreover, black-box representation learning provides neither explicit attribute semantics nor clear geographic or semantic meanings for SID positions. These limitations weaken both retrieval reliability and the ability to diagnose or control SID generation. We propose Interpretable Representation via LLM-Driven Generative Disentanglement for Local-Life Service Recommendation (LGRID). LGRID introduces a generative disentanglement paradigm through an Encode -> Disentangle -> Align -> Quantize pipeline. It first uses joint LLM encoding to preserve cross-attribute geographic-semantic dependencies, rather than encoding fields independently. A Structured Disentangled Block then routes hidden states into attribute-aligned slots for geographic and semantic factors. Synergistic Alignment Learning makes these slots both generatively decodable and discriminative for retrieval, while Dual-Stream Residual Quantization separately discretizes the two streams into compact SIDs with explicit attribute correspondence. This design yields interpretable SIDs with positions grounded in item attributes and local-service semantics. Experiments on Kuaishou and Foursquare show that LGRID consistently outperforms strong SID baselines, achieving up to a 5.44 percent relative AUC gain. It also achieves over 99 percent attribute-decoding accuracy for coarse geographic fields and reduces the full-SID collision rate to 39.9 percent, compared with 97.0 percent for LGSID.
Abstract:Semantic-ID-based generative recommenders enable efficient next-item generation, but their item-level supervision mainly captures behavioral co-occurrence and local transitions. Large language models (LLMs) can complement these models by reasoning over heterogeneous interaction histories to understand the user's current demand. However, LLMs are not inherently trained with recommendation-specific outcome feedback, and linguistically plausible reasoning therefore does not necessarily lead to effective recommendation decisions. We term this mismatch the Understanding-Action Gap. Accordingly, we distinguish intent knowledge, which captures the user's current demand, from policy knowledge, which specifies the recommendation direction and rejection boundary under that demand. To bridge this gap, we propose a feedback-driven agent framework that first induces task-oriented intent and then discovers recommendation policies according to their incremental utility over an intent-only baseline. Candidate policies are evaluated and refined using outcome-derived feedback rather than linguistic plausibility. We further transfer the resulting intent and policy knowledge into two latent tokens of a lightweight Semantic-ID generator through dual-space relational distillation, enabling LLM-free online inference. Experiments on public benchmarks show consistent improvements over baselines, while large-scale online A/B tests achieve gains of 4.506% in Revenue and 4.621% in ADVV.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their adoption as backbones for foundation recommendation models (FRMs). Existing approaches typically enhance recommendation with explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) under the Think-then-Answer paradigm. However, generating lengthy rationales introduces substantial inference overhead, while fixed CoT templates struggle to model diverse, dynamic, and context-dependent user interests. We propose WhisperRec, an efficient latent reasoning framework for FRMs. WhisperRec compresses teacher-generated CoT into learnable latent reasoning tokens, enabling a Latent-Reason-then-Answer paradigm that performs reasoning in latent space without producing verbose rationales. This design retains decision-relevant reasoning information while avoiding the latency bottleneck of autoregressive rationale generation. Specifically, it first introduces Multi-View Adaptive CoT (MV-ACoT) to construct diverse, high-quality supervision from complementary perspectives on user interests. MV-ACoT also adapts reasoning complexity to each instance, applying lightweight analysis to clear cases and targeted multi-factor reasoning to challenging ones. Building on a pre-trained FRM, WhisperRec then employs a three-stage Latent Reasoning Alignment procedure to progressively internalize teacher CoT into latent representations. Finally, curriculum-based post-training activates latent-token reasoning for downstream recommendation while preserving standard recommendation capability. Experiments on an industrial-scale Kuaishou dataset and the public Kuaishou LLM-Rec benchmark show that WhisperRec consistently outperforms explicit-CoT methods and conventional baselines. Compared with explicit CoT Think and No-Think variants, WhisperRec improves SID@64 by 17.44% and 9.33%, respectively, and achieves over 10x higher online inference throughput.
Abstract:Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) under missing modalities usually follow a repair-first paradigm. We revisit this assumption and ask: \emph{should every missing modality be repaired?} A per-sample oracle analysis shows the answer is not always: full-modality input is optimal for only a small fraction of samples, and every modality subset is preferred by some samples. These results suggest that adding or repairing modalities may not always improve prediction, and that the utility of each modality is sample-dependent. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{S}ufficiency-\textbf{I}nformed \textbf{E}vidential \textbf{V}al\textbf{vE} (\textbf{SIEVE}) that turns ``whether to repair'' into an explicit, learnable decision at the sample level. SIEVE compares a direct prediction branch with a repair branch, derives an empirical sufficiency signal from their per-sample loss gap, and routes each input through an evidential gate that jointly models sufficiency and its epistemic uncertainty. SIEVE is repair-agnostic: it operates as a plug-and-play decision on top of any explicit or implicit repair module, without modifying its internal design. Experiments on CMU-MOSI and IEMOCAP show that SIEVE consistently improves representative repair backbones across evaluated missing rates, and approaches the per-sample dual-branch achievable optimum.
Abstract:Recommendation algorithm iteration is moving from an artisanal, engineer-bound process toward an industrialized research loop, but this transition remains blocked by a structural execution bottleneck: the idea-to-launch cycle still depends on human engineers to generate hypotheses, modify production code, launch A/B experiments, and attribute online results. Innovation therefore scales linearly with headcount rather than compounding with evidence, compute, and accumulated experimental knowledge. We present AgentX, a production-deployed multi-agent system that fundamentally restructures this production function. AgentX operates as a self-evolving development engine: it autonomously generates, implements, evaluates, and learns from recommendation experiments at a scale and pace that no manual workflow can sustain. The system orchestrates four tightly coupled stages in a closed loop. A Brainstorm Agent synthesizes evidence from historical experiments, system architecture, data analysis, and external research into ranked, executable proposals. A Developing Agent translates each proposal into production-ready code through repository-grounded generation and multi-dimensional reliability verification. An Evaluation Agent conducts safe online rollout with guardrail-vetoed A/B judgment, converting both successes and failures into structured knowledge assets. A Harness Evolution layer (SGPO) then distills execution trajectories into semantic-gradient updates that continuously sharpen the agents themselves -- making the system not merely automated, but self-improving.
Abstract:Generative recommendation models in the OneRec family have been widely deployed in many real-world services, such as short-video, live-streaming, advertising, and e-commerce. However, these generative models can only benefit from the scaling advantage, while their reasoning ability is hard to activate, since we cannot construct meaningful Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sequences consisting of itemic tokens only. Inspired by the success of the reasoning-style ``think before answer'' paradigm in the LLM field, we conduct preliminary studies (i.e., OneRec-Think, OpenOneRec) to explore reasoning capability in generative recommendation. Nevertheless, we notice an unexpected phenomenon: the thinking mode does not show advantages over the non-thinking mode. Drawing insights from recent findings on CoT robustness in multi-modal language models, we argue that effective reasoning in recommendation rests on two factors: perception, the ability to ground itemic tokens in their underlying language semantics, and cognition, the ability to reorganize a user's behavior sequence into coherent latent interest points. We therefore propose OneReason, which includes: (1) strong itemic token perception in pre-training, (2) a three-level cognition-enhanced CoT format for recommendation tasks in SFT, and (3) a specialize-then-unify training recipe in RL to enhance the thinking ability.
Abstract:Linear attention provides an efficient backbone for long-sequence recommendation by avoiding the quadratic cost of standard Transformers, but its compressed recurrent state can be dominated by repetitive behavior patterns. We identify this phenomenon as semantic state sink, where recurring semantics over-occupy the recurrent state and bias subsequent readouts. To mitigate semantic state sink, we propose SinkRec, a hybrid memory-transition looped architecture that decouples collaborative behavioral pattern storage from dynamic transition modeling. SinkRec externalizes recurring local patterns into a learnable conditional memory through residual vector quantization, reinjects the retrieved codes, and exposes memory key-value pairs to the attention block. It further introduces Temporal-Aware State-Relation Differential Gated DeltaNet (TDGD), which uses memory to purify recurrent writing and reading by suppressing memory-covered updates and removing memory-aligned readout responses. This design turns recurring semantics from state-competing signals into memory-retrievable patterns, allowing the recurrent state to focus on dynamic transitions and alleviating semantic state sink with linear-time efficiency. Experiments on public and industrial datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SinkRec.
Abstract:Federated learning (FL) has recently become a promising solution for analyzing remote sensing satellite imagery (RSSI). However, the large scale and inherent data heterogeneity of images collected from multiple satellites, where the local data distribution of each satellite differs from the global one, present significant challenges to effective model training. To address this issue, we propose a Geometric Knowledge-Guided Federated Dual Knowledge Distillation (GK-FedDKD) framework for RSSI analysis. In our approach, each local client first distills a teacher encoder (TE) from multiple student encoders (SEs) trained with unlabeled augmented data. The TE is then connected with a shared classifier to form a teacher network (TN) that supervises the training of a new student network (SN). The intermediate representations of the TN are used to compute local covariance matrices, which are aggregated at the server to generate global geometric knowledge (GGK). This GGK is subsequently employed for local embedding augmentation to further guide SN training. We also design a novel loss function and a multi-prototype generation pipeline to stabilize the training process. Evaluation over multiple datasets showcases that the proposed GK-FedDKD approach is superior to the considered state-of-the-art baselines, e.g., the proposed approach with the Swin-T backbone surpasses previous SOTA approaches by an average 68.89% on the EuroSAT dataset.
Abstract:The growing scale of ad auctions on online advertising platforms has intensified competition, making manual bidding impractical and necessitating auto-bidding to help advertisers achieve their economic goals. Current auto-bidding methods have evolved to use offline reinforcement learning or generative methods to optimize bidding strategies, but they can sometimes behave counterintuitively due to the black-box training manner and limited mode coverage of datasets, leading to challenges in understanding task status and generalization in dynamic ad environments. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution by leveraging prior human knowledge and reasoning abilities to improve auto-bidding performance. However, directly applying LLMs to auto-bidding faces difficulties due to the need for precise actions in competitive auctions and the lack of specialized auto-bidding knowledge, which can lead to hallucinations and suboptimal decisions. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical Large autoBidding Model (LBM) to leverage the reasoning capabilities of LLMs for developing a superior auto-bidding strategy. This includes a high-level LBM-Think model for reasoning and a low-level LBM-Act model for action generation. Specifically, we propose a dual embedding mechanism to efficiently fuse two modalities, including language and numerical inputs, for language-guided training of the LBM-Act; then, we propose an offline reinforcement fine-tuning technique termed GQPO for mitigating the LLM-Think's hallucinations and enhancing decision-making performance without simulation or real-world rollout like previous multi-turn LLM-based methods. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of a generative backbone based on our LBM, especially in an efficient training manner and generalization ability.