Tokens are All You Need: Dual-purpose Semantic IDs for Achieving LLM-Level I/O Efficiency in recommendation systems
Large-scale recommendation systems face "Memory Wall" bottlenecks due to massive, dense embedding tables. While generative retrieval uses discrete tokens for IDs, high-dimensional context still relies on inefficient dense formats. Inspired by computer vision data compression, we propose Dual-purpose Semantic IDs to achieve LLM-level I/O efficiency. Our methodology uses hierarchical quantization to condense continuous embeddings into discrete Semantic IDs performing two concurrent roles: (1) Collaborative Identity: modeling user-item interactions via learnable embedding table; and (2) Content Reconstruction: using a lightweight Semantic Decoder for on-the-fly embedding approximation. This ...
| Authors | Baolei Li, Yiping Yuan, Yilin Zheng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 26 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 July 2026 |
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