AgentX: Towards Agent-Driven Self-Iteration of Industrial Recommender Systems

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.

OneReason Technical Report

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.

SinkRec: Mitigating Semantic State Sink in Long Sequence Recommendation with Memory-Conditioned Gated Delta Networks

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.

Geometric Knowledge-Assisted Federated Dual Knowledge Distillation Approach Towards Remote Sensing Satellite Imagery

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.

LBM: Hierarchical Large Auto-Bidding Model via Reasoning and Acting

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.

Generative Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Competitive Auctions via Diffusion Completer-Aligner

Auto-bidding is central to computational advertising, achieving notable commercial success by optimizing advertisers' bids within economic constraints. Recently, large generative models show potential to revolutionize auto-bidding by generating bids that could flexibly adapt to complex, competitive environments. Among them, diffusers stand out for their ability to address sparse-reward challenges by focusing on trajectory-level accumulated rewards, as well as their explainable capability, i.e., planning a future trajectory of states and executing bids accordingly. However, diffusers struggle with generation uncertainty, particularly regarding dynamic legitimacy between adjacent states, which can lead to poor bids and further cause significant loss of ad impression opportunities when competing with other advertisers in a highly competitive auction environment. To address it, we propose a Causal auto-Bidding method based on a Diffusion completer-aligner framework, termed CBD. Firstly, we augment the diffusion training process with an extra random variable t, where the model observes t-length historical sequences with the goal of completing the remaining sequence, thereby enhancing the generated sequences' dynamic legitimacy. Then, we employ a trajectory-level return model to refine the generated trajectories, aligning more closely with advertisers' objectives. Experimental results across diverse settings demonstrate that our approach not only achieves superior performance on large-scale auto-bidding benchmarks, such as a 29.9% improvement in conversion value in the challenging sparse-reward auction setting, but also delivers significant improvements on the Kuaishou online advertising platform, including a 2.0% increase in target cost.

Generative Auto-Bidding with Value-Guided Explorations

Auto-bidding, with its strong capability to optimize bidding decisions within dynamic and competitive online environments, has become a pivotal strategy for advertising platforms. Existing approaches typically employ rule-based strategies or Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques. However, rule-based strategies lack the flexibility to adapt to time-varying market conditions, and RL-based methods struggle to capture essential historical dependencies and observations within Markov Decision Process (MDP) frameworks. Furthermore, these approaches often face challenges in ensuring strategy adaptability across diverse advertising objectives. Additionally, as offline training methods are increasingly adopted to facilitate the deployment and maintenance of stable online strategies, the issues of documented behavioral patterns and behavioral collapse resulting from training on fixed offline datasets become increasingly significant. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel offline Generative Auto-bidding framework with Value-Guided Explorations (GAVE). GAVE accommodates various advertising objectives through a score-based Return-To-Go (RTG) module. Moreover, GAVE integrates an action exploration mechanism with an RTG-based evaluation method to explore novel actions while ensuring stability-preserving updates. A learnable value function is also designed to guide the direction of action exploration and mitigate Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problems. Experimental results on two offline datasets and real-world deployments demonstrate that GAVE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both offline evaluations and online A/B tests. The implementation code is publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

GAS: Generative Auto-bidding with Post-training Search

Auto-bidding is essential in facilitating online advertising by automatically placing bids on behalf of advertisers. Generative auto-bidding, which generates bids based on an adjustable condition using models like transformers and diffusers, has recently emerged as a new trend due to its potential to learn optimal strategies directly from data and adjust flexibly to preferences. However, generative models suffer from low-quality data leading to a mismatch between condition, return to go, and true action value, especially in long sequential decision-making. Besides, the majority preference in the dataset may hinder models' generalization ability on minority advertisers' preferences. While it is possible to collect high-quality data and retrain multiple models for different preferences, the high cost makes it unaffordable, hindering the advancement of auto-bidding into the era of large foundation models. To address this, we propose a flexible and practical Generative Auto-bidding scheme using post-training Search, termed GAS, to refine a base policy model's output and adapt to various preferences. We use weak-to-strong search alignment by training small critics for different preferences and an MCTS-inspired search to refine the model's output. Specifically, a novel voting mechanism with transformer-based critics trained with policy indications could enhance search alignment performance. Additionally, utilizing the search, we provide a fine-tuning method for high-frequency preference scenarios considering computational efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset and online A/B test on the Kuaishou advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of GAS, achieving significant improvements, e.g., 1.554% increment of target cost.

ACQ: A Unified Framework for Automated Programmatic Creativity in Online Advertising

In online advertising, the demand-side platform (a.k.a. DSP) enables advertisers to create different ad creatives for real-time bidding. Intuitively, advertisers tend to create more ad creatives for a single photo to increase the probability of participating in bidding, further enhancing their ad cost. From the perspective of DSP, the following are two overlooked issues. On the one hand, the number of ad creatives cannot grow indefinitely. On the other hand, the marginal effects of ad cost diminish as the number of ad creatives increases. To this end, this paper proposes a two-stage framework named Automated Creatives Quota (ACQ) to achieve the automatic creation and deactivation of ad creatives. ACQ dynamically allocates the creative quota across multiple advertisers to maximize the revenue of the ad platform. ACQ comprises two components: a prediction module to estimate the cost of a photo under different numbers of ad creatives, and an allocation module to decide the quota for photos considering their estimated costs in the prediction module. Specifically, in the prediction module, we develop a multi-task learning model based on an unbalanced binary tree to effectively mitigate the target variable imbalance problem. In the allocation module, we formulate the quota allocation problem as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) and develop an efficient solver to solve such large-scale problems involving tens of millions of ads. We performed extensive offline and online experiments to validate the superiority of our proposed framework, which increased cost by 9.34%.

LDACP: Long-Delayed Ad Conversions Prediction Model for Bidding Strategy

In online advertising, once an ad campaign is deployed, the automated bidding system dynamically adjusts the bidding strategy to optimize Cost Per Action (CPA) based on the number of ad conversions. For ads with a long conversion delay, relying solely on the real-time tracked conversion number as a signal for bidding strategy can significantly overestimate the current CPA, leading to conservative bidding strategies. Therefore, it is crucial to predict the number of long-delayed conversions. Nonetheless, it is challenging to predict ad conversion numbers through traditional regression methods due to the wide range of ad conversion numbers. Previous regression works have addressed this challenge by transforming regression problems into bucket classification problems, achieving success in various scenarios. However, specific challenges arise when predicting the number of ad conversions: 1) The integer nature of ad conversion numbers exacerbates the discontinuity issue in one-hot hard labels; 2) The long-tail distribution of ad conversion numbers complicates tail data prediction. In this paper, we propose the Long-Delayed Ad Conversions Prediction model for bidding strategy (LDACP), which consists of two sub-modules. To alleviate the issue of discontinuity in one-hot hard labels, the Bucket Classification Module with label Smoothing method (BCMS) converts one-hot hard labels into non-normalized soft labels, then fits these soft labels by minimizing classification loss and regression loss. To address the challenge of predicting tail data, the Value Regression Module with Proxy labels (VRMP) uses the prediction bias of aggregated pCTCVR as proxy labels. Finally, a Mixture of Experts (MoE) structure integrates the predictions from BCMS and VRMP to obtain the final predicted ad conversion number.