Title: IntSR: An Integrated Generative Framework for Search and Recommendation
Primary area: generative models
Keywords: Generative Framework, Unification of Recommendation and Search, Time-Aware Negative Sampling

Abstract: Generative recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm, demonstrating remarkable results in both academic benchmarks and industrial applications. However, existing systems predominantly focus on unifying retrieval and ranking while neglecting the integration of search and recommendation (S&R) tasks. What makes search and recommendation different is how queries are formed: search uses explicit user requests, while recommendation relies on implicit user interests. As for retrieval versus ranking, the distinction comes down to whether the queries are the target items themselves. Recognizing the query as central element, we propose IntSR, an integrated generative framework for S\&R. IntSR integrates these disparate tasks using distinct query modalities. It also addresses the increased computational complexity associated with integrated S&R behaviors and the erroneous pattern learning introduced by a dynamically changing corpus. IntSR has been successfully deployed across various scenarios on a large internet platform serving hundreds of millions of users, leading to substantial improvements: +9.34% GMV, +2.76% CTR, and +7.04% ACC in three distinct scenarios.