Break the Inaccessible Boundary: Distilling Post-Conversion Content for User Retention Modeling

User retention is a key metric to measure long-term engagement in modern platforms. In real-time bidding (RTB) advertising system for user re-engagement, the retention model is required to predict future revisit probability at bidding time, before the user converts and consumes any content. Although post-conversion content, termed Onboarding Content, provides highly informative signals for retention prediction, directly using it in training causes severe feature leakage and creates a gap between training and serving. To address this issue, we propose OCARM, a two-stage distillation-aligned framework for Onboarding Content Augmented Retention Modeling, enabling the model to implicitly capture future content using only observable features during inference. In the first stage, we deliberately expose onboarding content to train a hierarchical encoder that produces teacher representations. In the second stage, a user encoder is aligned with the frozen teacher through distillation, allowing the model to approximate the inaccessible onboarding signals without leakage. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that our framework achieves consistent improvements in a real-world growth scenario.

UniMixer: A Unified Architecture for Scaling Laws in Recommendation Systems

In recent years, the scaling laws of recommendation models have attracted increasing attention, which govern the relationship between performance and parameters/FLOPs of recommenders. Currently, there are three mainstream architectures for achieving scaling in recommendation models, namely attention-based, TokenMixer-based, and factorization-machine-based methods, which exhibit fundamental differences in both design philosophy and architectural structure. In this paper, we propose a unified scaling architecture for recommendation systems, namely \textbf{UniMixer}, to improve scaling efficiency and establish a unified theoretical framework that unifies the mainstream scaling blocks. By transforming the rule-based TokenMixer to an equivalent parameterized structure, we construct a generalized parameterized feature mixing module that allows the token mixing patterns to be optimized and learned during model training. Meanwhile, the generalized parameterized token mixing removes the constraint in TokenMixer that requires the number of heads to be equal to the number of tokens. Furthermore, we establish a unified scaling module design framework for recommender systems, which bridges the connections among attention-based, TokenMixer-based, and factorization-machine-based methods. To further boost scaling ROI, a lightweight UniMixing module is designed, \textbf{UniMixing-Lite}, which further compresses the model parameters and computational cost while significantly improve the model performance. The scaling curves are shown in the following figure. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted to verify the superior scaling abilities of \textbf{UniMixer}.

Selection and Exploitation of High-Quality Knowledge from Large Language Models for Recommendation

In recent years, there has been growing interest in leveraging the impressive generalization capabilities and reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) to improve the performance of recommenders. With this operation, recommenders can access and learn the additional world knowledge and reasoning information via LLMs. However, in general, for different users and items, the world knowledge derived from LLMs suffers from issues of hallucination, content redundant, and information homogenization. Directly feeding the generated response embeddings into the recommendation model can lead to unavoidable performance deterioration. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Selection \& Exploitation Recommendation (KSER) framework, which effectively select and extracts the high-quality knowledge from LLMs. The framework consists of two key components: a knowledge filtering module and a embedding spaces alignment module. In the knowledge filtering module, a Embedding Selection Filter Network (ESFNet) is designed to assign adaptive weights to different knowledge chunks in different knowledge fields. In the space alignment module, an attention-based architecture is proposed to align the semantic embeddings from LLMs with the feature space used to train the recommendation models. In addition, two training strategies--\textbf{all-parameters training} and \textbf{extractor-only training}--are proposed to flexibly adapt to different downstream tasks and application scenarios, where the extractor-only training strategy offers a novel perspective on knowledge-augmented recommendation. Experimental results validate the necessity and effectiveness of both the knowledge filtering and alignment modules, and further demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the extractor-only training strategy.