Title: Massive Memorization with Hundreds of Trillions of Parameters for Sequential Transducer Generative Recommenders
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: sequential recommendation systems, generative recommendation, production-scale data, user interaction history

Abstract: Modern large-scale recommendation systems rely heavily on user interaction history sequences to enhance the model performance. 
The advent of large language models and sequential modeling techniques, particularly transformer architectures, has led to significant advancements (e.g., HSTU, SIM, and TWIN models). While scaling to ultra-long user histories (10k to 100k items) generally improves model performance, it also creates significant challenges on latency, queries per second (QPS) and GPU cost in industry-scale recommendation systems. Existing models do not adequately address these industrial scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage modeling framework, namely \emph{VIrtual Sequential Target Attention} (VISTA), which decomposes traditional target attention from a candidate item to user history items into two distinct stages: (1) user history summarization into a few hundred tokens; followed by (2) candidate item attention to those tokens. These summarization token embeddings are then cached in storage system and then utilized as sequence features for downstream model training and inference. This novel design for scalability enables VISTA to scale to lifelong user histories (up to one million items) while keeping downstream training and inference costs fixed, which is essential in industry.
Our approach achieves significant improvements in offline and online metrics and has been successfully deployed on an industrial platform serving billions of users.

TL;DR: We propose VISTA, a two-stage attention model, for efficient storage of extensive user histories and inference in a production recommendation system.