PinRec: Unified Generative Retrieval for Pinterest Recommender Systems

Generative retrieval methods employ sequential modeling techniques, like transformers, to generate candidate items for recommender systems. These methods have demonstrated promising results in academic benchmarks, surpassing traditional retrieval models such as two-tower architectures. However, a key limitation is that current approaches require a separate model for each product surface, as building a unified model that accommodates the different business needs of various surfaces has proven challenging. Furthermore, existing methods often fail to capture the evolution of user interests over a sequence, focusing instead on only predicting the next item. This paper introduces Pinrec, a novel unified generative retrieval model for all of Pinterest's recommendation surfaces, including home feed, search, and related pins. Pinrec is pretrained on user activity sequences aggregated across surfaces, then fine-tuned for each surface using that surface's impression data. This pretraining-fine-tuning approach enables a single unified model while still adapting to the needs of individual surfaces. To better align recommendations with surface-specific business goals, Pinrec incorporates a novel outcome-conditioned generation mechanism that targets different outcomes for each surface, which further enhances the impact of fine-tuning. Our experiments show that Pinrec balances performance, diversity, and efficiency, delivering significant gains such as +4% increase in search saves. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first rigorous study of a unified generative retrieval model built and deployed at Pinterest scale, marking a significant milestone in the field.