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arXiv · 2608.30251

SetMIR: Multi-Interest Retrieval as Set Prediction

Xiaodong Liu·Congfei Zhang·Hsiang-wei Chao·Siman Wang·Xiao Bai·Tong Zhao·Jingxiao Ma·Wen Zhang·Zhe Liu·Shantanu Aggarwal·Di Huang·William Leach·Yunzhi Zhou·Yajun Wang·Jinchao Li·Yu Zhang
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Abstract

Embedding-based retrieval is at the core of industrial recommender systems, but a single user embedding is often too limited to capture a user's diverse interests. Multi-interest retrieval addresses this by using multiple user embeddings, yet existing methods still suffer from two issues: interest collapse, where different embeddings learn the same interest, and static dispatch, where serving uses a fixed retrieval budget even when some embeddings are unnecessary. We propose SetMIR, which treats multi-interest retrieval as a set prediction problem. SetMIR encodes a user's behavior history with a transformer and uses K learnable queries to decode a set of user interests, each producing a retrieval embedding and a presence score. During training, Hungarian matching assigns targets to queries one-to-one, so matched queries learn distinct interests and the presence head learns which queries are active. At serving time, SetMIR uses presence scores and query-level Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to issue only active, non-redundant ANN queries. On Snap's Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) data, SetMIR outperforms four learned multi-interest retrievers on every metric while issuing 33% fewer ANN queries per request. Deployed as a new retrieval source in the DPA production stack, SetMIR lifts overall CVR by 3.1%, while lifting CTR by 44% and CVR by 51% over the item-to-item retrieval source with the same item embeddings, ANN index, and retrieval quota.

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Xiaodong Liu, Congfei Zhang, Hsiang-wei Chao, Siman Wang, Xiao Bai, Tong Zhao, Jingxiao Ma, Wen Zhang, Zhe Liu, Shantanu Aggarwal, Di Huang, William Leach, Yunzhi Zhou, Yajun Wang, Jinchao Li, Yu Zhang. 2026-08-31. SetMIR: Multi-Interest Retrieval as Set Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30251

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