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.
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.