Zhengkai Guo | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

UniVA: Unified Value Alignment for Generative Recommendation in Online Advertising at Tencent

Generative Recommendation (GR) reformulates recommendation as next-token generation over item Semantic IDs (SIDs) and has shown promise in industrial applications. However, extending GR to advertising is non-trivial, as advertising recommendation must jointly account for user relevance and commercial value. This creates a mismatch: high generation likelihood does not necessarily imply high advertising utility. As a result, valuable ads may be poorly distinguished in the SID space, pruned during autoregressive decoding, or missed when request-invalid branches consume limited beam capacity during online serving. To address this problem, we propose UniVA, a Unified Value Alignment framework for generative advertising recommendation. UniVA aligns commercial value across the entire pipeline of SID construction, autoregressive decoding, and online serving. Commercial SID Tokenization injects business attributes and bid information into SID construction. A Generation-as-Ranking SID Decoder then fuses generation scores with token-level value estimates during autoregressive decoding. {Finally, Value-Aware Constrained Serving restricts the fused decoding process to request-valid SID paths through a personalized trie.} Experiments on the Tencent WeChat Channels advertising platform show that UniVA achieves a 37.04\% relative improvement in offline Hit Rate@100 over the baseline and lifts gross merchandise value (GMV) by 1.5\% in online A/B tests.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

GPR: Towards a Generative Pre-trained One-Model Paradigm for Large-Scale Advertising Recommendation

As an intelligent infrastructure connecting users with commercial content, advertising recommendation systems play a central role in information flow and value creation within the digital economy. However, existing multi-stage advertising recommendation systems suffer from objective misalignment and error propagation, making it difficult to achieve global optimality, while unified generative recommendation models still struggle to meet the demands of practical industrial applications. To address these issues, we propose GPR (Generative Pre-trained Recommender), the first one-model framework that redefines advertising recommendation as an end-to-end generative task, replacing the traditional cascading paradigm with a unified generative approach. To realize GPR, we introduce three key innovations spanning unified representation, network architecture, and training strategy. First, we design a unified input schema and tokenization method tailored to advertising scenarios, mapping both ads and organic content into a shared multi-level semantic ID space, thereby enhancing semantic alignment and modeling consistency across heterogeneous data. Second, we develop the Heterogeneous Hierarchical Decoder (HHD), a dual-decoder architecture that decouples user intent modeling from ad generation, achieving a balance between training efficiency and inference flexibility while maintaining strong modeling capacity. Finally, we propose a multi-stage joint training strategy that integrates Multi-Token Prediction (MTP), Value-Aware Fine-Tuning and the Hierarchy Enhanced Policy Optimization (HEPO) algorithm, forming a complete generative recommendation pipeline that unifies interest modeling, value alignment, and policy optimization. GPR has been fully deployed in the Tencent Weixin Channels advertising system, delivering significant improvements in key business metrics including GMV and CTCVR.

cs.IR↗