IntHQ: Task-Interactive Hierarchical Query on Dual-Stream Representations for Generative Recommendation
2026-08-10 • Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the problem of multi-task learning in recommendation systems using generative models. They identify three main issues (called collapses) that reduce performance when tasks share the same representation space. To fix this, they propose IntHQ, which separates shared and task-specific information early, allows tasks to interact dynamically, and gathers multi-scale features at different training stages. Their method outperforms existing approaches in tests and improves real-world travel recommendations on a large platform.
multi-task learninggenerative modelsrecommendation systemslatent spacetask-specific featurescross-task interactionhierarchical queryingencoder backbonesUVCTRAmap
Authors
Junjie Sun, Longfei Xu, Huimin Yan, Wei Luo, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu
Abstract
Multi-task learning over heterogeneous data is fundamental to modern recommendation, while generative models are emerging as the backbone of next-generation recommenders. However, the integration of multi-task learning into the generative paradigm remains largely unexplored. Existing multi-task recommenders, in both discriminative and generative paradigms, extract task-relevant features from a single task-agnostic representation and wire tasks into a predefined conversion funnel. We show that this scheme is inherently prone to a threefold collapse. Source collapse, where task-specific signals are injected late and diluted in the shared latent space. Relational collapse, where task dependencies are either implicitly absorbed by the backbone or statically fixed by predefined funnels. Hierarchical collapse, where tasks depend on features at different scales and shift across training stages. We propose IntHQ, a multi-task generative recommender with three components, each alleviating one collapse. Dual-Stream Decoupling (DSD) injects task identity into computation stream early and separates the shared context stream from the task-specific stream, alleviating signal dilution. Task-Interactive Modeling (TIM) replaces the predefined funnel with explicit cross-task interaction, letting each task condition on the realized outcomes of its predecessors with learned, input-adaptive strength. Hierarchical Querying (HQ) lets each task gather multi-scale information across different layers at different training stages. In offline evaluations, IntHQ consistently outperforms competitive encoder backbones under four representative task-head configurations. Deployed in production on Amap, serving hundreds of millions of users for travel recommendation, IntHQ yields a 1.60\% relative UVCTR lift.