arXiv subjects

Yi-Ping Hsu

Publications and source records attributed to Yi-Ping Hsu.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

LLMs Need Encoders for Semantic IDs Too

Multimodal LLMs use dedicated encoders to bridge non-language modalities (vision encoders for images, depth models for audio codec tokens) because raw token embeddings alone cannot capture modality-specific structure. We argue that Semantic IDs (SIDs), the hierarchical codes used in generative recommendation, constitute another such modality: a SID level token's meaning depends on its prefix context, yet current systems simply add SID tokens to the vocabulary and rely on training to learn these context-dependent meanings from scratch. We propose PrefixMem, a lightweight SID encoder based on prefix n-gram memory tables that provides the LLM with structured, prefix-conditioned representations at SID token positions. Like vision encoders in multimodal LLMs, PrefixMem can be pre-trained independently and then attached to any LLM for joint training. We evaluate on large-scale data from Pinterest across multiple LLM families and show that PrefixMem improves deepest-level SID accuracy by up to 46% relative and full-SID retrieval recall by up to 22% relative at matched training compute. The encoder's benefit concentrates on hard examples where greedy decoding fails, with up to 77% relative accuracy gains, confirming that SID tokens benefit from a dedicated encoder just as other non-language modalities do.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

UniPinRec: Unifying Generative Retrieval and Ranking at Pinterest Scale

Modern recommendation systems predominantly train retrieval and ranking as separate models despite both increasingly relying on large transformers encoding the same user behavior data, duplicating parameters, compute, and serving cost. Prior work unifies the model architecture but not the full pipeline: input formats, training procedures, and serving stacks remain fragmented across stages. We present UniPinRec, which achieves full-stack unification of retrieval and ranking at Pinterest: one input format, one model, one training stage, deployed within existing serving infrastructure. A shared transformer encodes the user action sequence into candidate-independent representations that branch into retrieval (ANN dot-product) and ranking (cross-attention) via task-specific heads. Three ideas make this work: (1) Masked Action Modeling (MAM) eliminates interleaving, enabling weight sharing without doubling context length; (2) Blended training examples pair action sequences with feedview impression slates to satisfy both objectives jointly; (3) Cross-stage KV cache sharing reuses user-history computation from retrieval for ranking, reducing total FLOPs versus serving two independent models. Deployed in the Pinterest core surfaces, UniPinRec delivers approximately +1% online engagement lift while cutting end-to-end serving latency by 11.1% and lifting QPS by 63.6%. To our knowledge, this is the first full-stack unification of retrieval and ranking, covering inputs, model, training and serving, deployed in a production recommendation system.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Taming the One-Epoch Phenomenon in Online Recommendation System by Two-stage Contrastive ID Pre-training

ID-based embeddings are widely used in web-scale online recommendation systems. However, their susceptibility to overfitting, particularly due to the long-tail nature of data distributions, often limits training to a single epoch, a phenomenon known as the "one-epoch problem." This challenge has driven research efforts to optimize performance within the first epoch by enhancing convergence speed or feature sparsity. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage training strategy that incorporates a pre-training phase using a minimal model with contrastive loss, enabling broader data coverage for the embedding system. Our offline experiments demonstrate that multi-epoch training during the pre-training phase does not lead to overfitting, and the resulting embeddings improve online generalization when fine-tuned for more complex downstream recommendation tasks. We deployed the proposed system in live traffic at Pinterest, achieving significant site-wide engagement gains.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

PinFM: Foundation Model for User Activity Sequences at a Billion-scale Visual Discovery Platform

User activity sequences have emerged as one of the most important signals in recommender systems. We present a foundational model, PinFM, for understanding user activity sequences across multiple applications at a billion-scale visual discovery platform. We pretrain a transformer model with 20B+ parameters using extensive user activity data, then fine-tune it for specific applications, efficiently coupling it with existing models. While this pretraining-and-fine-tuning approach has been popular in other domains, such as Vision and NLP, its application in industrial recommender systems presents numerous challenges. The foundational model must be scalable enough to score millions of items every second while meeting tight cost and latency constraints imposed by these systems. Additionally, it should capture the interactions between user activities and other features and handle new items that were not present during the pretraining stage. We developed innovative techniques to address these challenges. Our infrastructure and algorithmic optimizations, such as the Deduplicated Cross-Attention Transformer (DCAT), improved our throughput by 600% on Pinterest internal data. We demonstrate that PinFM can learn interactions between user sequences and candidate items by altering input sequences, leading to a 20% increase in engagement with new items. PinFM is now deployed to help improve the experience of more than half a billion users across various applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

PinRec: Unified Generative Retrieval for Pinterest Recommender Systems

Generative retrieval methods employ sequential modeling techniques, like transformers, to generate candidate items for recommender systems. These methods have demonstrated promising results in academic benchmarks, surpassing traditional retrieval models such as two-tower architectures. However, a key limitation is that current approaches require a separate model for each product surface, as building a unified model that accommodates the different business needs of various surfaces has proven challenging. Furthermore, existing methods often fail to capture the evolution of user interests over a sequence, focusing instead on only predicting the next item. This paper introduces Pinrec, a novel unified generative retrieval model for all of Pinterest's recommendation surfaces, including home feed, search, and related pins. Pinrec is pretrained on user activity sequences aggregated across surfaces, then fine-tuned for each surface using that surface's impression data. This pretraining-fine-tuning approach enables a single unified model while still adapting to the needs of individual surfaces. To better align recommendations with surface-specific business goals, Pinrec incorporates a novel outcome-conditioned generation mechanism that targets different outcomes for each surface, which further enhances the impact of fine-tuning. Our experiments show that Pinrec balances performance, diversity, and efficiency, delivering significant gains such as +4% increase in search saves. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first rigorous study of a unified generative retrieval model built and deployed at Pinterest scale, marking a significant milestone in the field.

cs.IR↗