Realizing Scaling Laws in Recommender Systems: A Foundation-Expert Paradigm for Hyperscale Model Deployment
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866911095184162816 |
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| author | Li, Dai Course, Kevin Li, Wei Li, Hongwei Hua, Jie Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Zhao Jian, Rui Cao, Xuan Xue, Bi Shi, Yu Qian, Jing Ren, Kai Ma, Matt Zhang, Qunshu Li, Rui |
| author_facet | Li, Dai Course, Kevin Li, Wei Li, Hongwei Hua, Jie Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Zhao Jian, Rui Cao, Xuan Xue, Bi Shi, Yu Qian, Jing Ren, Kai Ma, Matt Zhang, Qunshu Li, Rui |
| contents | While scaling laws promise significant performance gains for recommender systems, efficiently deploying hyperscale models remains a major unsolved challenge. In contrast to fields where FMs are already widely adopted such as natural language processing and computer vision, progress in recommender systems is hindered by unique challenges including the need to learn from online streaming data under shifting data distributions, the need to adapt to different recommendation surfaces with a wide diversity in their downstream tasks and their input distributions, and stringent latency and computational constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose to leverage the Foundation-Expert Paradigm: a framework designed for the development and deployment of hyperscale recommendation FMs. In our approach, a central FM is trained on lifelong, cross-surface, multi-modal user data to learn generalizable knowledge. This knowledge is then efficiently transferred to various lightweight, surface-specific "expert" models via target-aware embeddings, allowing them to adapt to local data distributions and optimization goals with minimal overhead. To meet our training, inference and development needs, we built HyperCast, a production-grade infrastructure system that re-engineers training, serving, logging and iteration to power this decoupled paradigm. Our approach is now deployed at Meta serving tens of billions of user requests daily, demonstrating online metric improvements over our previous one-stage production system while improving developer velocity and maintaining infrastructure efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful deployment of a Foundation-Expert paradigm at this scale, offering a proven, compute-efficient, and developer-friendly blueprint to realize the promise of scaling laws in recommender systems. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02929 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Realizing Scaling Laws in Recommender Systems: A Foundation-Expert Paradigm for Hyperscale Model Deployment Li, Dai Course, Kevin Li, Wei Li, Hongwei Hua, Jie Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Zhao Jian, Rui Cao, Xuan Xue, Bi Shi, Yu Qian, Jing Ren, Kai Ma, Matt Zhang, Qunshu Li, Rui Information Retrieval Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 68T05, 68T07, 68T30 H.3.3; I.2.6 While scaling laws promise significant performance gains for recommender systems, efficiently deploying hyperscale models remains a major unsolved challenge. In contrast to fields where FMs are already widely adopted such as natural language processing and computer vision, progress in recommender systems is hindered by unique challenges including the need to learn from online streaming data under shifting data distributions, the need to adapt to different recommendation surfaces with a wide diversity in their downstream tasks and their input distributions, and stringent latency and computational constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose to leverage the Foundation-Expert Paradigm: a framework designed for the development and deployment of hyperscale recommendation FMs. In our approach, a central FM is trained on lifelong, cross-surface, multi-modal user data to learn generalizable knowledge. This knowledge is then efficiently transferred to various lightweight, surface-specific "expert" models via target-aware embeddings, allowing them to adapt to local data distributions and optimization goals with minimal overhead. To meet our training, inference and development needs, we built HyperCast, a production-grade infrastructure system that re-engineers training, serving, logging and iteration to power this decoupled paradigm. Our approach is now deployed at Meta serving tens of billions of user requests daily, demonstrating online metric improvements over our previous one-stage production system while improving developer velocity and maintaining infrastructure efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful deployment of a Foundation-Expert paradigm at this scale, offering a proven, compute-efficient, and developer-friendly blueprint to realize the promise of scaling laws in recommender systems. |
| title | Realizing Scaling Laws in Recommender Systems: A Foundation-Expert Paradigm for Hyperscale Model Deployment |
| topic | Information Retrieval Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 68T05, 68T07, 68T30 H.3.3; I.2.6 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02929 |