arXiv subjects

Yaqiang Zang

Publications and source records attributed to Yaqiang Zang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Restoring Collaborative Signals in Semantic-ID Generative Recommendation via Personalized Natural Language

Making LLM-based generative recommendation models stronger and more personalized through natural language and explicit reasoning is a widely anticipated yet still unsolved goal. Such models cast recommendation as autoregressively generating an item's semantic-ID (SID), a short tuple of discrete codes, so that recommending well reduces to emitting the right SID. In this setting the model verbalizes its knowledge poorly, and text and SID tokens live in misaligned embedding spaces. Deep reasoning therefore rarely turns into a correct SID, and enabling explicit "thinking" often gives no gain or even hurts. The deeper cause is that a compact SID cannot hold content and collaborative signal at once: the two compete, and collaboration loses. Because a mis-predicted SID is a wrong recommendation, this caps accuracy directly. Costly multi-round training barely helps, and few methods try to supply the missing signal at inference time. What is missing is a reliable channel that carries collaborative signal into SID generation. We therefore propose a framework, guided by personalized natural language, that adds hierarchical collaborative cues as the model generates, without altering the backbone or retraining the SIDs. Rather than mapping language onto SIDs directly, it uses language to attach analyzable links between collaborative patterns and their audiences, restoring the collaborative signal that SIDs miss. The result is consistent gains in recommendation accuracy, grounding generation in collaborative structure at inference time rather than relying on explicit reasoning or retraining.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

OxygenREC-v2: Internalizing Discrimination into Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation unifies retrieval and ranking within a single model by autoregressively decoding semantic identifier (SID) sequences. Yet reliably incorporating behavior signals from clicks, cart additions, and orders remains challenging. Existing approaches either jointly optimize generative and discriminative objectives, requiring delicate trade-offs, or use a separate ranker as a post-hoc reinforcement-learning reward, risking out-of-distribution scoring and reward misalignment. We propose OxygenREC-v2, a generative recommender that Internalizes Discrimination into Generative Recommendation (IDGR). Rather than adding a separate discriminative objective, OxygenREC-v2 uses logged behavior to condition generation and supervise training. During pre-training, a behavior instruction conditions generation on the target behavior. During post-training, future interaction behaviors are exploited as privileged knowledge in our entropy-aware trajectory optimization self-distillation framework, enabling reward-model-free policy optimization. Throughout both training stages, OxygenREC-v2 maintains a single unified backbone. We implement OxygenREC-v2 as a 3B-parameter, 1B-activated MoE and deploy it on JD.com's large-scale e-commerce platform. Across multiple online A/B tests, OxygenREC-v2 improves user click-through conversion rate (UCTCVR) by 1.6--4.4% and GMV by 2.8--6.8% over OxygenREC-v1.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

OCP: Orthogonal Constrained Projection for Sparse Scaling in Industrial Commodity Recommendation

In industrial commodity recommendation systems, the representation quality of Item-Id vocabularies directly impacts the scalability and generalization ability of recommendation models. A key challenge is that traditional Item-Id vocabularies, when subjected to sparse scaling, suffer from low-frequency information interference, which restricts their expressive power for massive item sets and leads to representation collapse. To address this issue, we propose an Orthogonal Constrained Projection method to optimize embedding representation. By enforcing orthogonality, the projection constrains the backpropagation manifold, aligning the singular value spectrum of the learned embeddings with the orthogonal basis. This alignment ensures high singular entropy, thereby preserving isotropic generalized features while suppressing spurious correlations and overfitting to rare items. Empirical results demonstrate that OCP accelerates loss convergence and enhances the model's scalability; notably, it enables consistent performance gains when scaling up dense layers. Large-scale industrial deployment on JD.com further confirms its efficacy, yielding a 12.97% increase in UCXR and an 8.9% uplift in GMV, highlighting its robust utility for scaling up both sparse vocabularies and dense architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MARM: Unlocking the Future of Recommendation Systems through Memory Augmentation and Scalable Complexity

Scaling-law has guided the language model designing for past years, however, it is worth noting that the scaling laws of NLP cannot be directly applied to RecSys due to the following reasons: (1) The amount of training samples and model parameters is typically not the bottleneck for the model. Our recommendation system can generate over 50 billion user samples daily, and such a massive amount of training data can easily allow our model parameters to exceed 200 billion, surpassing many LLMs (about 100B). (2) To ensure the stability and robustness of the recommendation system, it is essential to control computational complexity FLOPs carefully. Considering the above differences with LLM, we can draw a conclusion that: for a RecSys model, compared to model parameters, the computational complexity FLOPs is a more expensive factor that requires careful control. In this paper, we propose our milestone work, MARM (Memory Augmented Recommendation Model), which explores a new cache scaling-laws successfully.

cs.IR↗