GRank: Towards Target-Aware and Streamlined Industrial Retrieval with a Generate-Rank Framework

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sun, Yijia, Huang, Shanshan, Guan, Zhiyuan, Luo, Qiang, Tang, Ruiming, Gai, Kun, Zhou, Guorui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sun, Yijia
Huang, Shanshan
Guan, Zhiyuan
Luo, Qiang
Tang, Ruiming
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
author_facet Sun, Yijia
Huang, Shanshan
Guan, Zhiyuan
Luo, Qiang
Tang, Ruiming
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
contents Industrial-scale recommender systems rely on a cascade pipeline in which the retrieval stage must return a high-recall candidate set from billions of items under tight latency. Existing solutions either (i) suffer from limited expressiveness in capturing fine-grained user-item interactions, as seen in decoupled dual-tower architectures that rely on separate encoders, or generative models that lack precise target-aware matching capabilities, or (ii) build structured indices (tree, graph, quantization) whose item-centric topologies struggle to incorporate dynamic user preferences and incur prohibitive construction and maintenance costs. We present GRank, a novel structured-index-free retrieval paradigm that seamlessly unifies target-aware learning with user-centric retrieval. Our key innovations include: (1) A target-aware Generator trained to perform personalized candidate generation via GPU-accelerated MIPS, eliminating semantic drift and maintenance costs of structured indexing; (2) A lightweight but powerful Ranker that performs fine-grained, candidate-specific inference on small subsets; (3) An end-to-end multi-task learning framework that ensures semantic consistency between generation and ranking objectives. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and a billion-item production corpus demonstrate that GRank improves Recall@500 by over 30% and 1.7$\times$ the P99 QPS of state-of-the-art tree- and graph-based retrievers. GRank has been fully deployed in production in our recommendation platform since Q2 2025, serving 400 million active users with 99.95% service availability. Online A/B tests confirm significant improvements in core engagement metrics, with Total App Usage Time increasing by 0.160% in the main app and 0.165% in the Lite version.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15299
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRank: Towards Target-Aware and Streamlined Industrial Retrieval with a Generate-Rank Framework
Sun, Yijia
Huang, Shanshan
Guan, Zhiyuan
Luo, Qiang
Tang, Ruiming
Gai, Kun
Zhou, Guorui
Information Retrieval
Industrial-scale recommender systems rely on a cascade pipeline in which the retrieval stage must return a high-recall candidate set from billions of items under tight latency. Existing solutions either (i) suffer from limited expressiveness in capturing fine-grained user-item interactions, as seen in decoupled dual-tower architectures that rely on separate encoders, or generative models that lack precise target-aware matching capabilities, or (ii) build structured indices (tree, graph, quantization) whose item-centric topologies struggle to incorporate dynamic user preferences and incur prohibitive construction and maintenance costs. We present GRank, a novel structured-index-free retrieval paradigm that seamlessly unifies target-aware learning with user-centric retrieval. Our key innovations include: (1) A target-aware Generator trained to perform personalized candidate generation via GPU-accelerated MIPS, eliminating semantic drift and maintenance costs of structured indexing; (2) A lightweight but powerful Ranker that performs fine-grained, candidate-specific inference on small subsets; (3) An end-to-end multi-task learning framework that ensures semantic consistency between generation and ranking objectives. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and a billion-item production corpus demonstrate that GRank improves Recall@500 by over 30% and 1.7$\times$ the P99 QPS of state-of-the-art tree- and graph-based retrievers. GRank has been fully deployed in production in our recommendation platform since Q2 2025, serving 400 million active users with 99.95% service availability. Online A/B tests confirm significant improvements in core engagement metrics, with Total App Usage Time increasing by 0.160% in the main app and 0.165% in the Lite version.
title GRank: Towards Target-Aware and Streamlined Industrial Retrieval with a Generate-Rank Framework
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15299