# SEMINAR: Search Enhanced Multi-modal Interest Network and Approximate Retrieval for Lifelong Sequential Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10714/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [Search-based User Interest Modeling with Lifelong Sequential Behavior Data for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05639/) (2020)
- [TWIN: TWo-stage Interest Network for Lifelong User Behavior Modeling in CTR Prediction at Kuaishou](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02352/) (2023)
- [When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10822/) (2023)
- [KuaiSAR: A Unified Search And Recommendation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07705/) (2023)
- [An Unified Search and Recommendation Foundation Model for Cold-Start Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08939/) (2023)
- [USER: A Unified Information Search and Recommendation Model based on Integrated Behavior Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15012/) (2021)
- [Query-dominant User Interest Network for Large-Scale Search Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06444/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The modeling of users' behaviors is crucial in modern recommendation systems. A lot of research focuses on modeling users' lifelong sequences, which can be extremely long and sometimes exceed thousands of items. These models use the target item to search for the most relevant items from the historical sequence. However, training lifelong sequences in click through rate (CTR) prediction or personalized search ranking (PSR) is extremely difficult due to the insufficient learning problem of ID embedding, especially when the IDs in the lifelong sequence features do not exist in the samples of training dataset. Additionally, existing target attention mechanisms struggle to learn the multi-modal representations of items in the sequence well. The distribution of multi-modal embedding (text, image and attributes) output of user's interacted items are not properly aligned and there exist divergence across modalities. We also observe that users' search query sequences and item browsing sequences can fully depict users' intents and benefit from each other. To address these challenges, we propose a unified lifelong multi-modal sequence model called SEMINAR-Search Enhanced Multi-Modal Interest Network and Approximate Retrieval. Specifically, a network called Pretraining Search Unit (PSU) learns the lifelong sequences of multi-modal query-item pairs in a pretraining-finetuning manner with multiple objectives: multi-modal alignment, next query-item pair prediction, query-item relevance prediction, etc. After pretraining, the downstream model restores the pretrained embedding as initialization and finetunes the network. To accelerate the online retrieval speed of multi-modal embedding, we propose a multi-modal codebook-based product quantization strategy to approximate the exact attention calculati