Papers for

e-commerce teams

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 recommenders speed up item suggestions by splitting thinking from spelling

Separating Thinking from Spelling for Efficient Generative Recommendation

Abstract: Generative recommenders retrieve items by writing their semantic IDs (SIDs) code by code under trie-constrained beam search, an approach now deployed on large web platforms. Standard autoregressive interfaces pay for the SID length K twice: a history of T items enters the backbone as TK code tokens, and every beam-search step runs through the backbone, so returning B candidates costs O(BK) backbone decode tokens per user. The second cost often dominates, and it grows with the backbone, the SID depth and the candidate budget. We introduce Deco (decoding from concepts), which separates reading the history from writing the identifier. The backbone reads each history item as one fused token and condenses the history once into a compact next-item concept; a light KV-cached decoder conditioned on the concept and the generated prefix runs the entire beam search, while the identifiers, the trie and the autoregressive factorization stay unchanged. The decoder approaches full-backbone accuracy with cross-entropy alone, and distillation improves it further. On seven datasets from e-commerce, movies and music streaming, Deco achieves comparable or better accuracy than both a standard generative recommender and the full-backbone teacher with fused inputs, while delivering 3.2--8.6$\times$ their throughput under a 50 ms p95 latency budget in a production-style serving pipeline. Delegating beam search makes larger candidate pools and models practical: Deco generates 1000 candidates faster than its teacher generates 100, and with a 1.5B-parameter LLM backbone, it matches the 69M-parameter teacher's throughput while achieving higher accuracy.

Fri 23 OctInformation Retrieval
The gist
Making item recommendations on big web platforms is often slow because generating each item's identifier takes a lot of steps. The authors propose a method called Deco that speeds up this process by separating how the system understands what to recommend from how it writes down the item IDs. Deco uses a smaller, faster decoder to handle the details after the main system summarizes the user's history. This approach keeps accuracy high while making the whole recommendation process up to 8.6 times faster.
Open → 2610.32980v1

Personalized image generation using user histories beats baselines

Personalized Image Generation with Reasoning and Reflection

Abstract: Personalized image generation has remained narrowly focused on conditional synthesis from curated visual exemplars, rather than capturing who a user is. In practice, however, a user's personal context is much richer, comprising reviews, posts, images, captions, and metadata accumulated over time. A truly personalized generator should leverage this history to produce images aligned with the user's lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. To this end, we introduce the first unified benchmark for personalized image generation from user histories. The benchmark comprises two complementary tasks and a multi-axis evaluation protocol that assesses target fidelity, visual quality, user distinguishability, semantic alignment with the user's history, and task-specific utility. Grounded in real-world e-commerce and social media settings, the benchmark includes: (1) Personalized Scene Generation, which places a given object in a scene that reflects a user's preferences and lifestyle, motivated by personalized product presentation; and (2) Personalized Creative Generation, which generates a novel image on a specified topic that is faithful to a user's aesthetic and visual identity, motivated by social media content creation. We further propose PEARL, which couples a multimodal reasoner with a frozen image generator in an interleaved reason-reflect loop optimized with differential data reward. Across both tasks, PEARL outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average improvement of 15% across personalization metrics.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Creating images that truly reflect a person's style and preferences is hard because people have rich histories online, including posts, images, and reviews. The authors made a new testing setup to measure how well AI can create images tailored to someone's unique tastes, using their entire online history. They introduced PEARL, a method that thinks and reflects in steps to produce images better matched to each person. PEARL did better than other methods in two tasks: placing products in user-specific scenes and creating new images that fit someone's visual style.
Open → 2610.00737v1