AI & ML
Merge and Branch: Efficient Tree-Structured Supervised Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Recommendation
arXiv cs.IR0 views
arXiv:2610.37973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based generative recommendation reads long, text-rich interaction histories but generates only short semantic identifiers (SIDs). This asymmetry makes supervised fine-tuning inefficient: encoding the history is expensive, yet each history usually provides supervision for only one target. We present Merge and Branch (M&B) to reduce input cost and learn more from each encoded history. Merge compresses each historical item's SID and text into a small number of learned tokens. Branch uses the compressed history to predict multiple target SIDs. To share history computation while keeping these targets independent, M&B organizes each example as a shallow, wide tree. We develop tree FlashAttention to execute this layout efficiently, processing the shared history once and propagating gradients from every branch for end-to-end training. A tree-structured key/value cache extends history sharing to constrained decoding. Experiments on public benchmarks show that M&B outperforms strong recommendation baselines while substantially improving training and decoding efficiency. Online A/B tests on a large-scale e-commerce platform suggest that M&B effectively combines item text with multi-target supervision, yielding statistically significant gains in per-user clicks, orders, and GMV.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37973PreviousMultimodal Graph RAG for Long-range Visually Rich Document UnderstandingNextAgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation
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