Recommendation is crucial for both user experience and company revenue in Meituan as a leading lifestyle company, and generative recommendation models (GRMs) are shown to produce quality recommendations recently. However, existing systems are limited by insufficient functionality support and inefficient implementations for training GRMs in industrial scenarios. As such, we introduce MTGenRec as an efficient and scalable system for GRM training. Specifically, to handle real-time insertions/deletions of sparse embeddings, MTGenRec employs dynamic hash tables to replace static ones. To improve training efficiency, MTGenRec conducts dynamic sequence balancing to address the computation load imbalances among GPUs and adopts feature ID deduplication alongside automatic table merging to accelerate embedding lookup. Extensive experiments show that MTGenRec improves training throughput by 1.6x - 2.4x while achieving good scalability when running over 100 GPUs. MTGenRec has been deployed for many applications in Meituan and is now handling hundreds of millions of requests on a daily basis. On the delivery platform, we observe a 1.22% growth in user order volume and a 1.31% enhancement in online PV_CTR.

Scaling law has recently been validated in the recommendation system, adopting generative recommendation strategies to achieve scalability. However, these generative approaches require abandoning the meticulously constructed cross features of traditional recommendation models,leading to a significant decline in model performance. To address this challenge, we propose Meituan Generative Recommendation, which is based on the HSTU architecture and is capable of retaining the original deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) features, including cross features. Additionally, MTGR achieves training and inference acceleration through user-level compression to ensure efficient scaling. We also propose Group-Layer Normalization (GLN) to enhance the performance of encoding within different semantic spaces and the dynamic masking strategy to avoid information leakage. We further optimize the training frameworks, enabling support for our models with 10 to 100 times computational complexity compared to the DLRM, without significant cost increases. MTGR achieved 65x FLOPs for single-sample forward inference compared to the DLRM model, resulting in the largest gain in nearly two years both offline and online. This breakthrough was successfully deployed on Meituan, the world's largest food delivery platform, where it has been handling the main traffic.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for Recommendation System(RS), aiming to provide personalized recommendation services for users in many aspects such as food delivery, e-commerce and so on. However, traditional RS relies on collaborative signals, which lacks semantic understanding to real-time scenes. We also noticed that a major challenge in utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for practical recommendation purposes is their efficiency in dealing with long text input. To break through the problems above, we propose Large Language Model Aided Real-time Scene Recommendation(LARR), adopt LLMs for semantic understanding, utilizing real-time scene information in RS without requiring LLM to process the entire real-time scene text directly, thereby enhancing the efficiency of LLM-based CTR modeling. Specifically, recommendation domain-specific knowledge is injected into LLM and then RS employs an aggregation encoder to build real-time scene information from separate LLM’s outputs. Firstly, a LLM is continual pretrained on corpus built from recommendation data with the aid of special tokens. Subsequently, the LLM is fine-tuned via contrastive learning on three kinds of sample construction strategies. Through this step, LLM is transformed into a text embedding model. Finally, LLM’s separate outputs for different scene features are aggregated by an encoder, aligning to collaborative signals in RS, enhancing the performance of recommendation model.

The analysis and mining of user heterogeneous behavior are of paramount importance in recommendation systems. However, the conventional approach of incorporating various types of heterogeneous behavior into recommendation models leads to feature sparsity and knowledge fragmentation issues. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for personalized recommendation via Large Language Model (LLM), by extracting and fusing heterogeneous knowledge from user heterogeneous behavior information. In addition, by combining heterogeneous knowledge and recommendation tasks, instruction tuning is performed on LLM for personalized recommendations. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively integrate user heterogeneous behavior and significantly improve recommendation performance.