In plain words: Instead of scoring ads with a ranking model, this system generates ad candidates as token sequences, with a decoder that skips layer-by-layer steps to serve many cheaply. Tests on Kuaishou's ad system lifted ad revenue up to 4.2% over the usual deep ranking stack.
Abstract
Generative recommendation has recently attracted widespread attention in industry due to its potential for scaling and stronger model capacity. However, deploying real-time generative recommendation in large-scale advertising requires designs beyond large-language-model (LLM)-style training and serving recipes. We present a production-oriented generative recommender co-designed across architecture, learning, and serving, named GR4AD (Generative Recommendation for ADdvertising). As for tokenization, GR4AD proposes UA-SID (Unified Advertisement Semantic ID) to capture complicated business information. Furthermore, GR4AD introduces LazyAR, a lazy autoregressive decoder that relaxes layer-wise dependencies for short, multi-candidate generation, preserving effectiveness while reducing inference cost, which facilitates scaling under fixed serving budgets. To align optimization with business value, GR4AD employs VSL (Value-Aware Supervised Learning) and proposes RSPO (Ranking-Guided Softmax Preference Optimization), a ranking-aware, list-wise reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes value-based rewards under list-level metrics for continual online updates. For online inference, we further propose dynamic beam serving, which adapts beam width across generation levels and online load to control compute. Large-scale online A/B tests show up to 4.2% ad revenue improvement over an existing DLRM-based stack, with consistent gains from both model scaling and inference-time scaling. GR4AD has been fully deployed in Kuaishou advertising system with over 400 million users and achieves high-throughput real-time serving.
Ben Xue, Dan Liu, Lixiang Wang, Mingjie Sun, Peng Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Shaoyun Shi, Tianyu Xu, Yunhao Sha, Zhiqiang Liu, Bo Kong, Bo Wang, et al.
arXiv:2602.22732 · cs.IR, cs.LG · submitted Feb 26, 2026 · updated Apr 2, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 13 pages, 6 figures, under review