Abstract
Generative retrieval models have been increasingly adopted in search and recommendation systems. However, industrial generative retrieval models are commonly specialized to a fixed online scenario: they learn from scenario-specific interactions, support a narrow set of query forms and retrieval objectives. We study how to remove these couplings and build a unified end-to-end multimodal search system for open-ended image--text queries, heterogeneous shopping intents, and online scenarios with different resource constraints. We present \textbf{PailitaoMMSearch}, which directly generates product Semantic IDs from a raw query image and free-form instruction and scales along three dimensions. \textbf{Data scaling} uses a reusable toolset that can be composed into intent- and lifecycle-specific workflows for cold-start synthesis, quality control, real-traffic refinement, and continuous data production. \textbf{Intent scaling} progressively equips one model with e-commerce product knowledge, multiple retrieval relations, and adjustable reasoning budgets through continual pre-training (CPT), mixed-budget supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and unified reinforcement learning (RL). The RL stage combines intent-balanced optimization and Sample--Beam rollouts aligned with multi-candidate serving. \textbf{Scenario scaling} exposes quality--cost operating points across model capacity and reasoning budget. The system is deployed in multimodal search applications on Taobao Pailitao. A controlled online A/B test reports statistically significant improvements, including item page views $\textbf{+17.90\%}$, transactions $\textbf{+27.04\%}$, and gross merchandise value $\textbf{+8.94\%}$.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36958
