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Wenwu Ou

Publications and source records attributed to Wenwu Ou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Reason What Matters: Retrieval-Grounded Reasoning for Universal Multimodal Embeddings

Universal multimodal embedding (UME) learns unified representations across modalities, enabling a single model to support diverse retrieval tasks. Recent methods use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to better interpret multimodal inputs before generating embeddings for complex retrieval tasks and further optimize this reasoning process through GRPO with retrieval-based rewards. However, two limitations hinder corpus-scale deployment. GRPO assigns all CoT tokens the same advantage, without identifying input-supported claims or evidence that distinguishes the positive from negatives. Moreover, generating a complete CoT before each embedding introduces substantial latency, even when a partial trace already provides sufficient retrieval evidence. To address these limitations, we propose Reason What Matters (ReWAM), a retrieval-grounded reasoning framework that uses retrieval feedback to guide both credit assignment and reasoning computation. Specifically, we introduce Retrieval-aware Self-Distillation (RASD), which constructs privileged guidance from input-supported evidence that distinguishes the positive item from retrieved hard negatives. An on-policy self-teacher uses this guidance to refine trajectory-level feedback into token-specific supervision for retrieval-relevant reasoning. We further develop Retrieval-adaptive Inference (RAI), which uses a retrieval confidence head to estimate the remaining retrieval utility of a partial CoT. It stops unproductive traces early and accelerates useful continuations with speculative decoding. Extensive experiments on MMEB-V2 and MRMR demonstrate that ReWAM achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance while delivering up to 5x the inference throughput of competitive explicit-CoT UME methods. These results bridge the gap between retrieval quality and inference efficiency, making reasoning-enhanced UME practical for large-scale deployment.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

RobustSGPO: Search-Space Control for Agent Harness Evolution

Semantic-gradient-based prompt optimization (SGPO) improves agent harnesses using execution feedback, but its local update rule leaves the choice of edit scope and operation unresolved. We introduce RobustSGPO, which specifies the requested edit, constructs and checks the patch, and continues search from either the incumbent or retained snapshots. We evaluate permission scheduling, cumulative controls, and task-family transfer in the AgentX brainstorming workflow using 120 tasks, 95 runs, and 7,350 candidate attempts. Periodic $1\to2\to3$ scheduling exceeds fixed maximum permission by 0.28 test-score points. RobustSGPO increases completion on 30 held-out tasks from 60.0% to 80.0% and improves test quality from 3.77 to 4.14 under a 20-million-token budget. Category retention reduces source-task degradation after a shift, whereas random retention reaches a higher destination endpoint. Search-space control benefits quality through executable edits and alternative starting points, with measurable retention overhead.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Generative Embedding Benchmark: How Much Information Survives in a Dense Embedding?

Embeddings have emerged as a standard representational interface linking foundation models with downstream systems. Most embedding benchmarks assess representations through discriminative tasks or geometric criteria centered on separability in embedding space. However, strong performance on such evaluations does not establish whether content compressed into an embedding remains accessible to a downstream generator. To address this gap, we introduce the Generative Embedding Benchmark (GEB), in which a decoder answers questions using only a frozen embedding and question text, without access to the original image or intermediate visual features. Answer quality under this readout measures generative information: the answer-relevant content recoverable from an embedding. GEB includes a curated visual-question-answering dataset with a 1,800-item development split and a held-out 900-item test split covering natural images, scene text, and visual documents. Using a common decoder and training recipe, we evaluate seven public embedding models in visual-only and vision-language joint modes. On the test set, visual-only scores range from 28.25 to 33.21; with image-question joint encoding, all five VLM-based embedding models score higher, and the best reaches 65.56. Matched embeddings also outperform text-only inputs, zero embeddings, and shuffled embeddings. Natural-image information is much easier to recover than scene text or visual-document information, while a Qwen3-VL-2B reference with access to the original image reaches 84.30. Together, these results show that generative readout exposes information bottlenecks that separability-based evaluation does not capture.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

From a Static Multi-Level Small Semantic Codebook to a Dynamic Single-Level Large Semantic Codebook for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation represents each item with a sequence of discrete Semantic IDs (SIDs) and predicts the sequence to retrieve the next item. Typical systems use multi-level residual quantization, which increases autoregressive decoding cost and creates a large hierarchical space that may be sparsely occupied. Static codebooks also become misaligned with current traffic as new items arrive and exposure distributions change. We propose a single-level large semantic codebook that replaces multiple residual semantic codes with one semantic token while retaining a separate collaborative disambiguation token to reduce item collisions. We further introduce an exposure-aware dynamic update mechanism based on temporal weight decay, exponential moving-average center updates, and an exposure-weighted penalty on SID changes. We also develop an offline evaluation framework covering representation quality, code utilization, cluster load, full-SID collision, and temporal stability. On two public datasets, the two-level SID improves mean Recall@10 by 5.0%-8.8% and mean NDCG@10 by 4.1%-5.1% for OneRec-V1, and by 7.1%-8.7% and 3.8%-8.5%, respectively, for OneRec-V2. Dynamic updating provides further gains on KuaiRec. Across three serving architectures, the shorter SID reduces estimated autoregressive-decoding FLOPs by 47.93%-48.70% and increases single-card QPS by 28.57%-47.0%. A five-day online A/B test serving 2.5% of production traffic improves the primary consumption metric by 0.792%.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

A/B Agent: A Self-Evolving Agent for Strategy Iteration in Industrial A/B Testing

Industrial recommendation strategy iteration heavily relies on large-scale A/B experimentation. Traditional tuning requires experts to repeatedly design strategies, configure experiments, analyze results, and adjust parameters, making the process labor-intensive and time-consuming. Meanwhile, valuable knowledge from historical experiments is often fragmented, making systematic reuse difficult through manual expert effort alone. Existing RAG agents partially alleviate this burden by retrieving prior strategies, but typically organize experience in a flat manner, overlooking the hierarchical relationships among business scenarios, recommendation stages, optimization objectives, and experimental contexts. This often results in mismatched retrieval and limited cross-scenario transfer, while preventing agents from continuously refining strategies and parameters through sequential A/B feedback. % To address these limitations, we propose A/B Agent, a closed-loop A/B agent for industrial recommendation strategy optimization. The framework comprises three tightly coupled core components: Historical Strategy Knowledge Organization, Autonomous Target-Aware Strategy Generation, and Experiment-Guided Strategy Self-Evolution. It organizes historical strategies into a hierarchical experience tree, retrieves transferable evidence through multi-path Tree-RAG to generate executable strategies, and continuously analyzes online A/B feedback to guide autonomous tuning and update the experience tree for self-evolution. Extensive offline and online evaluations demonstrate its effectiveness, including a 4.829% improvement in GMV in a real-world short-video e-commerce recommendation system while maintaining positive gains across all guardrail metrics.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

From Trajectories to Evidence: Auditable Experimental Records for Industrial Research Agents

Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions. Yet a completed trajectory is not automatically evidence: generated artifacts may be unsupported or incomplete, executed rounds may be invalid or confounded, and later modifications may obscure earlier findings. We study \textbf{trajectory-to-evidence conversion}, asking what a completed research process has actually established. We introduce an evidence-grounded framework that couples bounded verification of consequential artifacts with post-execution claim qualification. A context-isolated generate--verify--repair process checks artifacts for evidence violations and missing downstream requirements before release. After execution, validity and attribution checks consolidate evidence across rounds, qualify intervention-level claims as actionable repairs, diagnostic guards, or withheld findings, and preserve admitted claims as auditable records with explicit provenance and applicability boundaries. A hybrid LLM-assisted controller subsequently applies, defers, or rejects records based on available target evidence. Record audits characterize which claims survive qualification, while downstream diagnostics identify affirmative applicability judgment as a bottleneck for the tested controller. Across paper-to-target adaptations, later rounds often improve on the first, while final rounds frequently underperform an earlier best, exposing non-monotonic trajectory evolution. Candidates produced through the complete workflow also yielded positive online lifts relative to deployed baselines.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

WhisperRec: Latent Reasoning for Efficient Foundation Recommendation Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their adoption as backbones for foundation recommendation models (FRMs). Existing approaches typically enhance recommendation with explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) under the Think-then-Answer paradigm. However, generating lengthy rationales introduces substantial inference overhead, while fixed CoT templates struggle to model diverse, dynamic, and context-dependent user interests. We propose WhisperRec, an efficient latent reasoning framework for FRMs. WhisperRec compresses teacher-generated CoT into learnable latent reasoning tokens, enabling a Latent-Reason-then-Answer paradigm that performs reasoning in latent space without producing verbose rationales. This design retains decision-relevant reasoning information while avoiding the latency bottleneck of autoregressive rationale generation. Specifically, it first introduces Multi-View Adaptive CoT (MV-ACoT) to construct diverse, high-quality supervision from complementary perspectives on user interests. MV-ACoT also adapts reasoning complexity to each instance, applying lightweight analysis to clear cases and targeted multi-factor reasoning to challenging ones. Building on a pre-trained FRM, WhisperRec then employs a three-stage Latent Reasoning Alignment procedure to progressively internalize teacher CoT into latent representations. Finally, curriculum-based post-training activates latent-token reasoning for downstream recommendation while preserving standard recommendation capability. Experiments on an industrial-scale Kuaishou dataset and the public Kuaishou LLM-Rec benchmark show that WhisperRec consistently outperforms explicit-CoT methods and conventional baselines. Compared with explicit CoT Think and No-Think variants, WhisperRec improves SID@64 by 17.44% and 9.33%, respectively, and achieves over 10x higher online inference throughput.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Multi-Decoder OneRec: Controllable Generative Retrieval for Multi-Objective Industrial Recommendation

Industrial recommender systems build candidate pools by assigning explicit quotas to objective-specific retrieval routes. This design offers quota control but increasingly fragments modeling, training, and serving as the route set grows. Semantic-ID-based generative retrieval provides a unified alternative, yet a single decoder entangles objective policies and limits candidate complementarity. We propose Multi-Decoder OneRec, a controllable framework that combines shared representations, isolated objective adaptation, and coordinated decoding. All objectives share a user-context module and the General Decoder, while each objective adds an isolated, parameter-efficient LoRA expert. During training, exposure-sample next-token prediction (NTP) updates the shared base, target-filtered NTP updates the event-based experts, and Kullback-Leibler (KL)-regularized policy optimization updates the Watch-time expert; gradient routing isolates these updates, and the General Decoder supplies a stop-gradient reference. At inference, explicit route quotas allocate the fixed budget and Multi-Decoder Constrained Beam Search reduces cross-route overlap. We publicly release Kwai26, a large-scale multi-objective benchmark with 1.31 billion raw item-level records, 31.85 million Item-ID entries, and 25.03 million items with valid Semantic IDs, together with predefined splits and an evaluation protocol. Under the same 512-item retrieval budget, Multi-Decoder OneRec improves over the single-decoder OneRec baseline by 1.69%-5.62% across four Recall@512 metrics. In a production A/B test, it yields relative gains of 0.37% in app usage time per device, 0.19% in Day-7 retained users, 0.19% in devices with at least one share, and 2.09% in new-content Cold-Start. These results show that generative retrieval can combine shared modeling with objective-specific control and complementary candidate generation.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Reward Guided Decoding for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation formulates recommendation task into an SID sequence autoregressive generation paradigm, but the decoding process is often dominated by generation likelihood. This may conflict with real-world business objectives, where high-value candidates can receive low generation probability and be pruned early during beam search. Existing reranking or training-time alignment methods either intervene too late or require costly model retraining when business preferences change. To this end, we propose \textbf{R}eward \textbf{G}uided \textbf{D}ecoding, named \textbf{RGD}, a controllable decoding framework for industrial value-oriented generative recommendation. We formulate value-guided decoding as a KL-regularized reward maximization problem, deriving a closed-form reward guided decoding distribution that principledly combines generation probability with reward signals. RGD treats the base generator as a reference policy and introduces a reward model as a test-time controller, injecting reward into each decoding step to reshape the search trajectory without retraining the generator. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for aligning personalization and business value. RGD has been deployed on the Kuaishou platform, bringing consistent improvements in real-world recommendation scenarios.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

OneRetrieval: Unifying Multi-Branch E-commerce Retrieval with an Editable Generative Model

Industrial e-commerce search serves hundreds of millions of items through a multi-branch retrieval stage fused by hand-tuned merging without joint optimization. Generative retrieval (GR) raises the prospect of collapsing this stage into a single model, yet unification is gated by more than retrieval quality: the inverted-index branch converts below the platform average yet persists because it is almost the only branch where operations can inject a new term within hours without any model update; a one-model substitute must preserve this real-time editability. Existing GR methods structurally lack it: closed-codebook methods fix each slot to a quantized embedding at training, while open-vocabulary methods leave new-term routing to model generalization. We present OneRetrieval, a one-model GR framework built on Keyword-Aligned Encoding (KAE), which ties each identifier position to an interpretable attribute word, pairing competitive recall quality with the editability of the inverted index -- to our knowledge the first editable generative retrieval method. An information-theoretic merging organizes 18 attribute categories into six codebook groups with non-uniform capacity; reserved slots in each codebook can be bound to new words after deployment without retraining; and a four-stage fine-tuning pipeline secures quality and editability jointly. On five million real-traffic requests, OneRetrieval matches the deep recall of the strongest generative baseline, with an intervention hit rate over an order of magnitude above closed-codebook encodings. Online, replacing the inverted-index branch significantly lifts order volume; extending to nearly the entire stage holds conversion while improving CTR. The system is deployed at Kuaishou, serving hundreds of millions of PVs daily.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

OneBar: An End-to-End Content-Grounded Generative Query Recommendation Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds

Short-video platforms now expose clickable search entries beneath the video player, enabling users to easily express content-induced search intent. However, conventional query recommendation systems on short-video platforms suffer from latency constraints and objective misalignment, while recent generative approaches struggle with noisy content-side metadata and preference drift. To address these issues, we propose OneBar, an end-to-end generative framework for real-time query recommendation for E-Commerce video feeds. OneBar features three key innovations: (1) a collaborative-multimodal intent grounding module that fuses multimodal video understanding and behavior-derived collaborative anchors; (2) a Unified End-to-End architecture equipped with a prompt-compression mechanism for efficient online serving; and (3) a progressive preference learning strategy for efficient preference-internalization, which internalizes hierarchical behavior preferences into the generative policy, eliminating the need for a separately trained reward model. Compared with online base, OneBar increases Query Exposure by 16.91\% and Query Click by 18.68\%, while maintaining a slight Query CTR gain of 0.19\%. The additional search traffic further contributes to 20.36\% more guided orders and 21.67\% higher GMV.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Plan Before Search: Search Agents Need Plan

Training large language models as retrieval-augmented reasoning agents typically combines reinforcement learning with an SFT cold start distilled from a stronger model. However, this paradigm overlooks two fundamental factors: the dependency structure among sub-skills, and the possibility that distillation is not the only route to capability acquisition. We study this through Plan, a structured agentic behavior for multi-hop retrieval that decomposes a question into ordered sub-questions before any retrieval is performed, so that each search step can be anchored to a pre-designed sub-question instead of drifting under the influence of partially relevant documents retrieved earlier. However, across three model families spanning 3B to 14B parameters, we find that an identical reward signal induces qualitatively different RL failure modes. This phenomenon indicates that successful training hinges not only on reward design but also on model-specific feasibility conditions: sufficient initial entropy, training stability, and prerequisite sub-skills. Motivated by this, we propose a self-bootstrapping paradigm in which a small-scale seed model generates filtered trajectories that activate Plan in any target model, eliminating the need for distillation from an external stronger model. Our pipeline activates Plan across every tested model and consistently outperforms competitive baselines on multi-hop QA benchmarks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SVFSearch: A Multimodal Knowledge-Intensive Benchmark for Short-Video Frame Search in the Gaming Vertical Domain

Multimodal large language models are increasingly used as agent backbones that understand multimodal inputs, plan retrieval actions, invoke external tools, and reason over retrieved information. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate this ability in short-video applications, where a paused frame is often visually ambiguous and answering requires vertical, long-tail, and fast-evolving domain knowledge. We introduce SVFSearch, the first open benchmark for short-video frame search in the Chinese gaming domain. SVFSearch contains 5,000 four-choice test examples and 4,198 auxiliary training examples, each centered on a paused game scene from a real short-video clip. To support fair and reproducible evaluation, SVFSearch provides a frozen offline retrieval environment with a game-domain text corpus, a topic-linked image gallery, and text, image, and multimodal retrieval interfaces, avoiding reliance on uncontrolled web search APIs. We evaluate representative paradigms ranging from direct QA and RAG workflow to Plan-Act-Replan agents and learned search models. Results reveal a large gap between model-only answering, practical agentic search, and oracle knowledge: the best open-source direct-QA model reaches 66.4%, the best practical agent achieves 79.1%, and oracle knowledge reaches 95.4%. Further analysis exposes bottlenecks in visual grounding, retrieval quality, evidence-grounded reasoning, and tool-use behavior, including over-search, answer-only shortcuts, and retrieval-induced misleading.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SD-Search: On-Policy Hindsight Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Reasoning

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search decision in a rollout shares the same trajectory-level reward, leaving individual queries without step-specific credit. Recent process-supervision approaches address this gap by drawing step-level signals from outside the policy, relying either on a much larger teacher model, or on sub-question annotations produced by a stronger external system. In contrast, we propose SD-Search, which derives step-level supervision from the policy itself through on-policy hindsight self-distillation, requiring neither an external teacher nor additional annotations. In SD-Search, a single model plays two roles that differ only in conditioning: a student that sees only the context available at inference time, and a teacher that additionally conditions on a compact hindsight block summarizing the search queries and final outcomes of a group of rollouts sampled from the same question. Since the teacher knows how each rollout unfolded and which ones succeeded, its query distribution implicitly marks which decisions were worth making, and the student is trained to recover this behavior by minimizing the token-level Jensen--Shannon divergence to the teacher at search-query positions. This layers a dense, step-level signal on top of GRPO's coarse trajectory reward. Crucially, this signal is produced by the policy itself within the standard RL training loop, without external model inference, auxiliary annotation pipeline, or additional training stage.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

TIGER-FG: Text-Guided Implicit Fine-Grained Grounding for E-commerce Retrieval

E-commerce image search often takes a cropped image as the query, while each candidate is represented by full item images and structured text. This image-to-multimodal retrieval setting presents two asymmetries: a modality disparity -- a visual query must match image--text items, and a granularity disparity -- a cropped query must be compared with full images containing background context and possible distractors. Detection-based pipelines handle the granularity disparity through explicit localization but incur extra cost and error propagation, whereas CLIP-style encoders avoid detection, but are vulnerable to backgrounds or irrelevant items. To address these limitations, we propose TIGER-FG, a text-guided implicit fine-grained grounding framework for image-to-multimodal e-commerce retrieval. TIGER-FG uses item text as semantic guidance to produce target-focused item representations without object detection for retrieval. We further introduce dual distillation objectives that preserve target-region spatial consistency and query--item similarity structure, yielding more stable and discriminative multimodal representations. In addition, we construct ECom-RF-IMMR, a realistic benchmark suite with a 10M-pair training set and two evaluation benchmarks covering standard and cluttered item layouts. TIGER-FG improves Recall@1 over the strongest baseline by 6.1 and 34.4 percentage points on the two evaluation benchmarks, respectively, with only 85.7M query-side parameters and 256-dim embeddings. Results on public e-commerce benchmarks further demonstrate its generalization to noisy and one-to-many retrieval scenarios. Code and data will be released.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

OneSearch-V2: The Latent Reasoning Enhanced Self-distillation Generative Search Framework

Generative Retrieval (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for modern search systems. Compared to multi-stage cascaded architecture, it offers advantages such as end-to-end joint optimization and high computational efficiency. OneSearch, as a representative industrial-scale deployed generative search framework, has brought significant commercial and operational benefits. However, its inadequate understanding of complex queries, inefficient exploitation of latent user intents, and overfitting to narrow historical preferences have limited its further performance improvement. To address these challenges, we propose OneSearch-V2, a latent reasoning enhanced self-distillation generative search framework. It contains three key innovations: (1) a thought-augmented complex query understanding module, which enables deep query understanding and overcomes the shallow semantic matching limitations of direct inference; (2) a reasoning-internalized self-distillation training pipeline, which uncovers users' potential yet precise e-commerce intentions beyond log-fitting through implicit in-context learning; (3) a behavior preference alignment optimization system, which mitigates reward hacking arising from the single conversion metric, and addresses personal preference via direct user feedback. Extensive offline evaluations demonstrate OneSearch-V2's strong query recognition and user profiling capabilities. Online A/B tests further validate its business effectiveness, yielding +3.98\% item CTR, +2.07\% buyer volume, and +2.11\% order volume. Manual evaluation further confirms gains in search experience quality, with +1.37\% in page good rate and +1.65\% in query-item relevance. More importantly, OneSearch-V2 effectively mitigates common search system issues such as information bubbles and long-tail sparsity, without incurring additional inference costs or serving latency.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Scale over Preference: The Impact of AI-Generated Content on Online Content Ecology

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) is fundamentally restructuring online content ecologies, necessitating a rigorous examination of its behavioral and distributional implications. Leveraging a comprehensive longitudinal dataset comprising tens of millions of users from a leading Chinese video-sharing platform, this study elucidated the distinct creation and consumption behaviors characterizing AIGC versus Human-Generated Content (HGC). We identified a prevalent scale-over-preference dynamic, wherein AIGC creators achieve aggregate engagement comparable to HGC creators through high-volume production, despite a marked consumer preference for HGC. Deeper analysis uncovered the ability of the algorithmic content distribution mechanism in moderating these competing interests regarding AIGC. These findings advocated for the implementation of AIGC-sensitive distribution algorithms and precise governance frameworks to ensure the long-term health of the online content platforms.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Static Collision Handling: Adaptive Semantic ID Learning for Multimodal Recommendation at Industrial Scale

Modern recommendation systems involve massive catalogs of multimodal items, where scalable item identification must balance compactness, semantic fidelity, and downstream effectiveness. Semantic IDs (SIDs) address this need by representing items as short discrete token sequences derived from multimodal signals, providing a compact interface for retrieval, ranking, and generative recommendation. However, effective SID learning is hindered by collisions, where different items are assigned identical or highly confusable codes. Existing methods mainly rely on improved quantization or fixed overlap regularization, but they do not adaptively distinguish whether an overlap should be suppressed or preserved. We propose AdaSID, an adaptive semantic ID learning framework for recommendation. AdaSID regulates SID overlaps through a two-stage process. First, it relaxes repulsion for observed overlaps when the involved items are semantically compatible, preserving admissible sharing rather than uniformly separating all collisions. Second, it allocates the remaining regulation pressure according to local collision load and training progress, strengthening control in congested regions while gradually rebalancing optimization toward recommendation alignment. This design adaptively decides which overlaps to penalize, how strongly to regulate them, and when to shift the learning focus. Extensive offline and online experiments validate AdaSID. On two public benchmarks, AdaSID improves Recall and NDCG by about 4.5% on average over strong baselines, while improving codebook utilization and SID diversity. In Kuaishou e-commerce, an online A/B test on short-video retrieval covering tens of millions of users achieves statistically significant gains, including a 0.98% GMV improvement, and industrial ranking evaluation shows consistent AUC improvements.

cs.IR↗