Abstract:User behavior sequence modeling plays a significant role in Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction on e-commerce platforms. Except for the interacted items, user behaviors contain rich interaction information, such as the behavior type, time, location, etc. However, so far, the information related to user behaviors has not yet been fully exploited. In the paper, we propose the concept of a situation and situational features for distinguishing interaction behaviors and then design a CTR model named Deep Situation-Aware Interaction Network (DSAIN). DSAIN first adopts the reparameterization trick to reduce noise in the original user behavior sequences. Then it learns the embeddings of situational features by feature embedding parameterization and tri-directional correlation fusion. Finally, it obtains the embedding of behavior sequence via heterogeneous situation aggregation. We conduct extensive offline experiments on three real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DSAIN model. More importantly, DSAIN has increased the CTR by 2.70\%, the CPM by 2.62\%, and the GMV by 2.16\% in the online A/B test. Now, DSAIN has been deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform and serves the main traffic of the Meituan takeout app.
Abstract:In modern multi-stage recommendation systems, reranking plays a critical role by modeling contextual information. Due to inherent challenges such as the combinatorial space complexity, an increasing number of methods adopt the generative paradigm: the generator produces the optimal list during inference, while an evaluator guides the generator's optimization during the training phase. However, these methods still face two problems. Firstly, these generators fail to produce optimal generation results due to the lack of both local and global perspectives, regardless of whether the generation strategy is autoregressive or non-autoregressive. Secondly, the goal inconsistency problem between the generator and the evaluator during training complicates the guidance signal and leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose the \textbf{N}ext-\textbf{S}cale \textbf{G}eneration \textbf{R}eranking (NSGR), a tree-based generative framework. Specifically, we introduce a next-scale generator (NSG) that progressively expands a recommendation list from user interests in a coarse-to-fine manner, balancing global and local perspectives. Furthermore, we design a multi-scale neighbor loss, which leverages a tree-based multi-scale evaluator (MSE) to provide scale-specific guidance to the NSG at each scale. Extensive experiments on public and industrial datasets validate the effectiveness of NSGR. And NSGR has been successfully deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform.
Abstract:Generative recommendation (GR) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for industrial recommendations. GR leverages Semantic IDs (SIDs) to reduce the encoding-decoding space and employs the Next Token Prediction (NTP) framework to explore scaling laws. However, existing GR methods suffer from two critical issues: (1) a \textbf{seesaw phenomenon} in multi-business scenarios arises due to NTP's inability to capture complex cross-business behavioral patterns; and (2) a unified SID space causes \textbf{representation confusion} by failing to distinguish distinct semantic information across businesses. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Business Generative Recommendation (MBGR), the first GR framework tailored for multi-business scenarios. Our framework comprises three key components. First, we design a Business-aware semantic ID (BID) module that preserves semantic integrity via domain-aware tokenization. Then, we introduce a Multi-Business Prediction (MBP) structure to provide business-specific prediction capabilities. Furthermore, we develop a Label Dynamic Routing (LDR) module that transforms sparse multi-business labels into dense labels to further enhance the multi-business generation capability. Extensive offline and online experiments on Meituan's food delivery platform validate MBGR's effectiveness, and we have successfully deployed it in production.
Abstract:High-fidelity motion tracking serves as the ultimate litmus test for generalizable, human-level motor skills. However, current policies often hit a "generality barrier": as motion libraries scale in diversity, tracking fidelity inevitably collapses - especially for real-world deployment of high-dynamic motions. We identify this failure as the result of two compounding factors: the learning bottleneck in scaling multi-motion optimization and the physical executability constraints that arise in real-world actuation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce OmniXtreme, a scalable framework that decouples general motor skill learning from sim-to-real physical skill refinement. Our approach uses a flow-matching policy with high-capacity architectures to scale representation capacity without interference-intensive multi-motion RL optimization, followed by an actuation-aware refinement phase that ensures robust performance on physical hardware. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniXtreme maintains high-fidelity tracking across diverse, high-difficulty datasets. On real robots, the unified policy successfully executes multiple extreme motions, effectively breaking the long-standing fidelity-scalability trade-off in high-dynamic humanoid control.
Abstract:Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain underexplored. To fully understand the role of RL, we conduct a systematic study along three decoupled dimensions: prompt template, reward function, and policy optimization. Our study reveals that: 1) the Fast Thinking template yields greater stability and better performance than the Slow Thinking template used in prior work; 2) the F1-based reward underperforms the EM due to training collapse driven by answer avoidance; this can be mitigated by incorporating action-level penalties, ultimately surpassing EM; 3) REINFORCE outperforms PPO while requiring fewer search actions, whereas GRPO shows the poorest stability among policy optimization methods. Building on these insights, we then introduce Search-R1++, a strong baseline that improves the performance of Search-R1 from 0.403 to 0.442 (Qwen2.5-7B) and 0.289 to 0.331 (Qwen2.5-3B). We hope that our findings can pave the way for more principled and reliable RL training strategies in Deep Research systems.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on perception-oriented tasks, yet their ability to perform mathematical spatial reasoning, defined as the capacity to parse and manipulate two- and three-dimensional relations, remains unclear. Humans easily solve textbook-style spatial reasoning problems with over 95\% accuracy, but we find that most leading MLLMs fail to reach even 60\% on the same tasks. This striking gap highlights spatial reasoning as a fundamental weakness of current models. To investigate this gap, we present MathSpatial, a unified framework for evaluating and improving spatial reasoning in MLLMs. MathSpatial includes three complementary components: (i) MathSpatial-Bench, a benchmark of 2K problems across three categories and eleven subtypes, designed to isolate reasoning difficulty from perceptual noise; (ii) MathSpatial-Corpus, a training dataset of 8K additional problems with verified solutions; and (iii) MathSpatial-SRT, which models reasoning as structured traces composed of three atomic operations--Correlate, Constrain, and Infer. Experiments show that fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on MathSpatial achieves competitive accuracy while reducing tokens by 25\%. MathSpatial provides the first large-scale resource that disentangles perception from reasoning, enabling precise measurement and comprehensive understanding of mathematical spatial reasoning in MLLMs.
Abstract:Multimodal retrieval models are becoming increasingly important in scenarios such as food delivery, where rich multimodal features can meet diverse user needs and enable precise retrieval. Mainstream approaches typically employ a dual-tower architecture between queries and items, and perform joint optimization of intra-tower and inter-tower tasks. However, we observe that joint optimization often leads to certain modalities dominating the training process, while other modalities are neglected. In addition, inconsistent training speeds across modalities can easily result in the one-epoch problem. To address these challenges, we propose a staged pretraining strategy, which guides the model to focus on specialized tasks at each stage, enabling it to effectively attend to and utilize multimodal features, and allowing flexible control over the training process at each stage to avoid the one-epoch problem. Furthermore, to better utilize the semantic IDs that compress high-dimensional multimodal embeddings, we design both generative and discriminative tasks to help the model understand the associations between SIDs, queries, and item features, thereby improving overall performance. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world Meituan data demonstrate that our method achieves improvements of 3.80%, 2.64%, and 2.17% on R@5, R@10, and R@20, and 5.10%, 4.22%, and 2.09% on N@5, N@10, and N@20 compared to mainstream baselines. Online A/B testing on the Meituan platform shows that our approach achieves a 1.12% increase in revenue and a 1.02% increase in click-through rate, validating the effectiveness and superiority of our method in practical applications.
Abstract:Semantic IDs serve as a key component in generative recommendation systems. They not only incorporate open-world knowledge from large language models (LLMs) but also compress the semantic space to reduce generation difficulty. However, existing methods suffer from two major limitations: (1) the lack of contextual awareness in generation tasks leads to a gap between the Semantic ID codebook space and the generation space, resulting in suboptimal recommendations; and (2) suboptimal quantization methods exacerbate semantic loss in LLMs. To address these issues, we propose Dual-Flow Orthogonal Semantic IDs (DOS) method. Specifically, DOS employs a user-item dual flow-framework that leverages collaborative signals to align the Semantic ID codebook space with the generation space. Furthermore, we introduce an orthogonal residual quantization scheme that rotates the semantic space to an appropriate orientation, thereby maximizing semantic preservation. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing demonstrate the effectiveness of DOS. The proposed method has been successfully deployed in Meituan's mobile application, serving hundreds of millions of users.
Abstract:In recent years, the success of large language models (LLMs) has driven the exploration of scaling laws in recommender systems. However, models that demonstrate scaling laws are actually challenging to deploy in industrial settings for modeling long sequences of user behaviors, due to the high computational complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism. Despite various sparse self-attention mechanisms proposed in other fields, they are not fully suited for recommendation scenarios. This is because user behaviors exhibit personalization and temporal characteristics: different users have distinct behavior patterns, and these patterns change over time, with data from these users differing significantly from data in other fields in terms of distribution. To address these challenges, we propose SparseCTR, an efficient and effective model specifically designed for long-term behaviors of users. To be precise, we first segment behavior sequences into chunks in a personalized manner to avoid separating continuous behaviors and enable parallel processing of sequences. Based on these chunks, we propose a three-branch sparse self-attention mechanism to jointly identify users' global interests, interest transitions, and short-term interests. Furthermore, we design a composite relative temporal encoding via learnable, head-specific bias coefficients, better capturing sequential and periodic relationships among user behaviors. Extensive experimental results show that SparseCTR not only improves efficiency but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, it exhibits an obvious scaling law phenomenon, maintaining performance improvements across three orders of magnitude in FLOPs. In online A/B testing, SparseCTR increased CTR by 1.72\% and CPM by 1.41\%. Our source code is available at https://github.com/laiweijiang/SparseCTR.
Abstract:Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies suggest that introducing the SFT stage not only fails to improve reasoning ability but may also negatively impact model training. In this study, we revisit this RL-centric belief through a systematic and controlled comparison of SFT and RL on VLM Reasoning. Using identical data sources, we find that the relative effectiveness of SFT and RL is conditional and strongly influenced by model capacity, data scale, and data distribution. Contrary to common assumptions, our findings show that SFT plays a crucial role across several scenarios: (1) Effectiveness for weaker models. SFT more reliably elicits reasoning capabilities in smaller or weaker VLMs. (2) Data efficiency. SFT with only 2K achieves comparable or better reasoning performance to RL with 20K. (3) Cross-modal transferability. SFT demonstrates stronger generalization across modalities. Moreover, we identify a pervasive issue of deceptive rewards, where higher rewards fail to correlate with better reasoning accuracy in RL. These results challenge the prevailing "RL over SFT" narrative. They highlight that the role of SFT may have been underestimated and support a more balanced post-training pipeline in which SFT and RL function as complementary components.