Papers for

ad platform engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Generative ad retrieval improves Douyin’s recommendation accuracy

Generative End-to-end Ad Retrieval at Douyin

Abstract: Generative retrieval reformulates recommendation as the generation of discrete item tokens. However, scaling this paradigm to real-world recommender systems reveals two critical bottlenecks: 1) Representation collapse, where the item tokenizer converges to degenerate results under continuous distribution shifts, fundamentally hindering stable end-to-end adaptation. 2) Item collisions, where the massive candidate pool causes distinct items to share identical token sequences, compromising the final retrieval precision. Crucially, these bottlenecks are inherently coupled: expanding codebook capacity to mitigate collisions inevitably exacerbates collapse. To address them simultaneously, we propose GEAR, an end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes the tokenizer, generator, and reranker. To mitigate representation collapse, we introduce BasisVQ, which re-parameterizes the codebook via an orthogonal basis to enable global gradient sharing and rigid spatial rotation of the latent space, effectively stabilizing gradient dynamics without ad-hoc heuristics. We further extend it to prefix-aware BasisRQ, substantially enhancing the codebook's expressiveness with the same asymptotic time complexity. To resolve item collisions, GEAR integrates a context-conditioned reranking head into the generative process, efficiently disambiguating colliding items with minimal computational overhead. By unifying stable tokenization and joint reranking within an end-to-end generative framework, GEAR establishes a fully differentiable and scalable paradigm. It currently serves hundreds of millions of daily active users on Douyin Ads, yielding substantial empirical improvements in extensive online A/B tests.

Wed 30 SeptInformation Retrieval
The gist
Recommending ads on big platforms can be tricky because similar items can get mixed up and models can become unstable over time. The authors propose a method called GEAR that fixes these problems by making the system’s internal code more stable and by checking hard-to-distinguish items closely. This system works together smoothly and helps Douyin show better ads to hundreds of millions of users every day.
Open → 2609.39327v1