2025/02/14 by Shuai Xu, Xu, Songpei, Shijia Wang +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Recommender Systems and Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.09888
openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/02/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Transformer-based generative models have achieved remarkable success across domains with various scaling law manifestations. However, our extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges when applying Transformer to recommendation systems: (1) Transformer scaling is not ideal with increased computational resources, due to structural incompatibilities with recommendation-specific features such as multi-source data heterogeneity; (2) critical online inference latency constraints (tens of milliseconds) that intensify with longer user behavior sequences and growing computational demands. We propose Climber, an efficient recommendation framework comprising two synergistic components: the model architecture for efficient scaling and the co-designed acceleration techniques. Our proposed model adopts two core innovations: (1) multi-scale sequence extraction that achieves a time complexity reduction by a constant factor, enabling more efficient scaling with sequence length; (2) dynamic temperature modulation adapting attention distributions to the multi-scenario and multi-behavior patterns. Complemented by acceleration techniques, Climber achieves a 5.15× throughput gain without performance degradation by adopting a "single user, multiple item" batched processing and memory-efficient Key-Value caching. Comprehensive offline experiments on multiple datasets validate that Climber exhibits a more ideal scaling curve. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly documented framework where controlled model scaling drives continuous online metric growth (12.19% overall lift) without prohibitive resource costs. Climber has been successfully deployed on Netease Cloud Music, one of China's largest music streaming platforms, serving tens of millions of users daily.