探索全球前沿学术脉络

Token Factory: Efficiently Integrating Diverse Signals into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.

Wisdom of Committee: Diverse Distillation from Large Foundation Models and Domain Experts

arXiv:2402.14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality. For example, in our experiments, distilling from a 76M-parameter language model to a 2M-parameter recommender closes less than 40% of the performance gap between the undistilled student and the teacher. We show that introducing domain-specific experts – which share the student's architectural characteristics – alongside the foundation model as a diverse teacher committee significantly improves transfer. However, standard multi-teacher methods fail to exploit this diversity: naively combining heterogeneous teachers can degrade performance below single-teacher distillation. To address this, we propose DiverseDistill, an interactive distillation framework that employs a learnable Question-Answer mechanism to generate teacher-conditioned queries and align heterogeneous teacher outputs into the student's representation space. Unlike methods requiring gradient-based co-optimization or architectural modification of teachers, DiverseDistill operates with frozen teachers using only forward-pass inference through their intermediate layers: no parameter updates, no co-training, and no architectural surgery. A dynamic teacher importance mechanism further reduces training cost by filtering low-relevance teachers per sample (e.g., ~30% fewer forward passes with no quality loss for recommendation tasks), while the entire Distillation Module is discarded after training, adding zero inference overhead. Evaluations on recommendation (38x compression) and vision (3.6x compression) tasks demonstrate that DiverseDistill recovers 73-114% of the teacher-student performance gap, consistently outperforming all single- and multi-teacher baselines.