# Efficient Multi-Task Learning via Generalist Recommender

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [Beyond Distillation: Task-level Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03742/) (2021)
- [Explainable Recommendation via Multi-Task Learning in Opinionated Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03568/) (2018)
- [Learning Effective and Efficient Embedding via an Adaptively-Masked Twins-based Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11513/) (2021)
- [Learning to Expand Audience via Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics for Recommendation and Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14688/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Sim-MSTNet: sim2real based Multi-task SpatioTemporal Network Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21384/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty Modeling for Multi-Objective RTA Interception with Distillation Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05582/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a common machine learning technique that allows the model to share information across different tasks and improve the accuracy of recommendations for all of them. Many existing MTL implementations suffer from scalability issues as the training and inference performance can degrade with the increasing number of tasks, which can limit production use case scenarios for MTL-based recommender systems. Inspired by the recent advances of large language models, we developed an end-to-end efficient and scalable Generalist Recommender (GRec). GRec takes comprehensive data signals by utilizing NLP heads, parallel Transformers, as well as a wide and deep structure to process multi-modal inputs. These inputs are then combined and fed through a newly proposed task-sentence level routing mechanism to scale the model capabilities on multiple tasks without compromising performance. Offline evaluations and online experiments show that GRec significantly outperforms our previous recommender solutions. GRec has been successfully deployed on one of the largest telecom websites and apps, effectively managing high volumes of online traffic every day.