Masked Diffusion Generative Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mu, Lingyu, Deng, Hao, Xing, Haibo, Hu, Jinxin, Zhang, Yu, Zeng, Xiaoyi, Zhang, Jing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912857295159296
author Mu, Lingyu
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Jing
author_facet Mu, Lingyu
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Jing
contents Generative recommendation (GR) typically first quantizes continuous item embeddings into multi-level semantic IDs (SIDs), and then generates the next item via autoregressive decoding. Although existing methods are already competitive in terms of recommendation performance, directly inheriting the autoregressive decoding paradigm from language models still suffers from three key limitations: (1) autoregressive decoding struggles to jointly capture global dependencies among the multi-dimensional features associated with different positions of SID; (2) using a unified, fixed decoding path for the same item implicitly assumes that all users attend to item attributes in the same order; (3) autoregressive decoding is inefficient at inference time and struggles to meet real-time requirements. To tackle these challenges, we propose MDGR, a Masked Diffusion Generative Recommendation framework that reshapes the GR pipeline from three perspectives: codebook, training, and inference. (1) We adopt a parallel codebook to provide a structural foundation for diffusion-based GR. (2) During training, we adaptively construct masking supervision signals along both the temporal and sample dimensions. (3) During inference, we develop a warm-up-based two-stage parallel decoding strategy for efficient generation of SIDs. Extensive experiments on multiple public and industrial-scale datasets show that MDGR outperforms ten state-of-the-art baselines by up to 10.78%. Furthermore, by deploying MDGR on a large-scale online advertising platform, we achieve a 1.20% increase in revenue, demonstrating its practical value.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19501
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Masked Diffusion Generative Recommendation
Mu, Lingyu
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
Zhang, Jing
Information Retrieval
Generative recommendation (GR) typically first quantizes continuous item embeddings into multi-level semantic IDs (SIDs), and then generates the next item via autoregressive decoding. Although existing methods are already competitive in terms of recommendation performance, directly inheriting the autoregressive decoding paradigm from language models still suffers from three key limitations: (1) autoregressive decoding struggles to jointly capture global dependencies among the multi-dimensional features associated with different positions of SID; (2) using a unified, fixed decoding path for the same item implicitly assumes that all users attend to item attributes in the same order; (3) autoregressive decoding is inefficient at inference time and struggles to meet real-time requirements. To tackle these challenges, we propose MDGR, a Masked Diffusion Generative Recommendation framework that reshapes the GR pipeline from three perspectives: codebook, training, and inference. (1) We adopt a parallel codebook to provide a structural foundation for diffusion-based GR. (2) During training, we adaptively construct masking supervision signals along both the temporal and sample dimensions. (3) During inference, we develop a warm-up-based two-stage parallel decoding strategy for efficient generation of SIDs. Extensive experiments on multiple public and industrial-scale datasets show that MDGR outperforms ten state-of-the-art baselines by up to 10.78%. Furthermore, by deploying MDGR on a large-scale online advertising platform, we achieve a 1.20% increase in revenue, demonstrating its practical value.
title Masked Diffusion Generative Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19501