# Scaling New Frontiers: Insights into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Thought-Augmented Planning for LLM-Powered Interactive Recommender Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23485/) (2025)
- [TD3: Tucker Decomposition Based Dataset Distillation Method for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02854/) (2025)
- [CoSteer: Collaborative Decoding-Time Personalization via Local Delta Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04756/) (2025)
- [Mimic In-Context Learning for Multimodal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08851/) (2025)
- [Why Thinking Hurts: Diagnosing and Rectifying Linguistic Inertia in Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16587/) (2026)
- [RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05119/) (2025)
- [Revisiting scalable sequential recommendation with Multi-Embedding Approach and Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25285/) (2025)
- [From Scaling to Structured Expressivity: Rethinking Transformers for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12081/) (2025)
- [Efficient Personalized Reranking with Semi-Autoregressive Generation and Online Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07107/) (2026)
- [Expand More, Shrink Less: Shaping Effective-Rank Dynamics for Dense Scaling in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23191/) (2026)
- [AsymSpec: Context-Asymmetric Speculative Decoding for Agentic LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26004/) (2026)
- [Towards a Densing Law for User Representation Learning at Billion-Scale Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23392/) (2026)
- [DP-Rec: Towards Dynamic Patching for Efficient Long-Sequence Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32215/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommendation systems are essential for filtering data and retrieving relevant information across various applications. Recent advancements have seen these systems incorporate increasingly large embedding tables, scaling up to tens of terabytes for industrial use. However, the expansion of network parameters in traditional recommendation models has plateaued at tens of millions, limiting further benefits from increased embedding parameters. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), a new approach has emerged that scales network parameters using innovative structures, enabling continued performance improvements. A significant development in this area is Meta's generative recommendation model HSTU, which illustrates the scaling laws of recommendation systems by expanding parameters to thousands of billions. This new paradigm has achieved substantial performance gains in online experiments. In this paper, we aim to enhance the understanding of scaling laws by conducting comprehensive evaluations of large recommendation models. Firstly, we investigate the scaling laws across different backbone architectures of the large recommendation models. Secondly, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to explore the origins of these scaling laws. We then further assess the performance of HSTU, as the representative of large recommendation models, on complex user behavior modeling tasks to evaluate its applicability. Notably, we also analyze its effectiveness in ranking tasks for the first time. Finally, we offer insights into future directions for large recommendation models. Supplementary materials for our research are available on GitHub at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/Large-Recommendation-Models.