Grevo: A Unified Generative Recommendation Framework with Evolutionary Item Indexing

Generative recommendation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that reformulates retrieval as autoregressive generation over semantic identifiers (SIDs), achieving strong performance and drawing increasing attention as an alternative to matching. Despite this progress, SIDs are typically frozen by a content-based tokenizer before the recommender is trained, leaving a persistent gap between what best reconstructs an item's content and what a recommender can predict from user behavior. Recent end-to-end methods close this gap by jointly training the tokenizer and the recommender, but coupling the two destabilizes the identifier space and requires a second learnable model, alignment losses, and usually a delicate alternating-optimization schedule. To address this issue, we propose Grevo, a unified Generative recommendation framework with evolutionary item indexing, which treats the SID assignment itself as an evolvable discrete variable that adapts to behavioral feedback rather than as a tokenizer to be trained. Grevo builds on a single multitask recommender that unifies a behavioral SID generation task and a semantic SID grounding task, letting the recommender absorb the tokenizer's role. Through evolutionary item indexing, Grevo then uses the trained recommender itself as a posterior evaluator to reassign a budgeted set of high-risk identifiers under a fixed vocabulary and length. Together, these components turn index construction into a stable, feedback-driven search that requires no second learnable model, no alignment losses, and no alternating-optimization schedule. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that Grevo consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommendation methods.

DREAM: Dynamic Refinement of Early Assignment Mappings

Generative recommendation advances item retrieval by reformulating it as autoregressive generation of Semantic IDs (SIDs), compact token sequences that encode item semantics. While SIDs offer a strong semantic prior, current SID-based methods assign each item a single static identifier through offline tokenization before sufficient user feedback is observed. For cold-start items, this one-shot commitment produces poorly discriminative codes, generating misaligned paths that remain unrefined because the associated tokens are rarely sampled during training. We identify this early static commitment, not model capacity, as the fundamental cold-start bottleneck in SID-based generative recommendation. To overcome this bottleneck and bridge the disjoint objectives of tokenization and generation, we propose DREAM (Dynamic Refinement of Early Assignment Mappings), a three-stage framework that resolves this flaw through progressive refinement. First, an intent-aware tokenizer rebuilds the SID space through counterfactual contrastive learning, generating a diverse pool of behavior-aligned candidates per cold-start item. Second, the frozen recommendation backbone serves as an evaluator, selecting the most reliable candidate based on multi-context user support without retraining. Third, a dynamic beam mechanism maintains multiple weighted SID hypotheses throughout training and inference, preventing premature collapse to a single assignment. Extensive experiments on three Amazon benchmarks show that DREAM substantially outperforms state-of-the-art generative and sequential baselines on cold-start metrics.

PIT: A Dynamic Personalized Item Tokenizer for End-to-End Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation has revolutionized recommender systems by reformulating retrieval as a sequence generation task over discrete item identifiers. Despite the progress, existing approaches typically rely on static, decoupled tokenization that ignores collaborative signals. While recent methods attempt to integrate collaborative signals into item identifiers either during index construction or through end-to-end modeling, they encounter significant challenges in real-world production environments. Specifically, the volatility of collaborative signals leads to unstable tokenization, and current end-to-end strategies often devolve into suboptimal two-stage training rather than achieving true co-evolution. To bridge this gap, we propose PIT, a dynamic Personalized Item Tokenizer framework for end-to-end generative recommendation, which employs a co-generative architecture that harmonizes collaborative patterns through collaborative signal alignment and synchronizes item tokenizer with generative recommender via a co-evolution learning. This enables the dynamic, joint, end-to-end evolution of both index construction and recommendation. Furthermore, a one-to-many beam index ensures scalability and robustness, facilitating seamless integration into large-scale industrial deployments. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PIT consistently outperforms competitive baselines. In a large-scale deployment at Kuaishou, an online A/B test yielded a substantial 0.402% uplift in App Stay Time, validating the framework's effectiveness in dynamic industrial environments.