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arXiv · 2505.04421

LONGER: Scaling Up Long Sequence Modeling in Industrial Recommenders

Zheng Chai·Qin Ren·Xijun Xiao·Huizhi Yang·Bo Han·Sijun Zhang·Di Chen·Hui Lu·Wenlin Zhao·Lele Yu·Xionghang Xie·Shiru Ren·Xiang Sun·Yaocheng Tan·Peng Xu·Yuchao Zheng·Di Wu
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Abstract

Modeling ultra-long user behavior sequences is critical for capturing both long- and short-term preferences in industrial recommender systems. Existing solutions typically rely on two-stage retrieval or indirect modeling paradigms, incuring upstream-downstream inconsistency and computational inefficiency. In this paper, we present LONGER, a Long-sequence Optimized traNsformer for GPU-Efficient Recommenders. LONGER incorporates (i) a global token mechanism for stabilizing attention over long contexts, (ii) a token merge module with lightweight InnerTransformers and hybrid attention strategy to reduce quadratic complexity, and (iii) a series of engineering optimizations, including training with mixed-precision and activation recomputation, KV cache serving, and the fully synchronous model training and serving framework for unified GPU-based dense and sparse parameter updates. LONGER consistently outperforms strong baselines in both offline metrics and online A/B testing in both advertising and e-commerce services at ByteDance, validating its consistent effectiveness and industrial-level scaling laws. Currently, LONGER has been fully deployed at more than 10 influential scenarios at ByteDance, serving billion users.

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Zheng Chai, Qin Ren, Xijun Xiao, Huizhi Yang, Bo Han, Sijun Zhang, Di Chen, Hui Lu, Wenlin Zhao, Lele Yu, Xionghang Xie, Shiru Ren, Xiang Sun, Yaocheng Tan, Peng Xu, Yuchao Zheng, Di Wu. 2025-05-07. LONGER: Scaling Up Long Sequence Modeling in Industrial Recommenders. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04421

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