# Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2025.

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

- [From Ranking to Selection: A Simple but Efficient Dynamic Passage Selector for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09497/) (2025)
- [RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05119/) (2025)
- [SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07837/) (2026)
- [Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10150/) (2026)
- [Efficient Personalized Reranking with Semi-Autoregressive Generation and Online Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07107/) (2026)
- [IE as Cache: Information Extraction Enhanced Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14930/) (2026)
- [UniPinRec: Unifying Generative Retrieval and Ranking at Pinterest Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00422/) (2026)
- [AsymSpec: Context-Asymmetric Speculative Decoding for Agentic LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26004/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Purified Representation and Integrated Semantic Modeling for Generative Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16556/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Necessity of Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Lens of Adaptive Listwise Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15621/) (2026)
- [UniGD: A Unified Generative-Discriminative Framework for Industrial Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03150/) (2026)
- [DP-Rec: Towards Dynamic Patching for Efficient Long-Sequence Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32215/) (2026)
- [DTA-GT: Direction- and Topology-Aware Graph Transformer for Neural Network Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16822/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recommendation systems, the traditional multi-stage paradigm, which includes retrieval and ranking, often suffers from information loss between stages and diminishes performance. Recent advances in generative models, inspired by natural language processing, suggest the potential for unifying these stages to mitigate such loss. This paper presents the Unified Generative Recommendation Framework (UniGRF), a novel approach that integrates retrieval and ranking into a single generative model. By treating both stages as sequence generation tasks, UniGRF enables sufficient information sharing without additional computational costs, while remaining model-agnostic. To enhance inter-stage collaboration, UniGRF introduces a ranking-driven enhancer module that leverages the precision of the ranking stage to refine retrieval processes, creating an enhancement loop. Besides, a gradient-guided adaptive weighter is incorporated to dynamically balance the optimization of retrieval and ranking, ensuring synchronized performance improvements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniGRF significantly outperforms existing models on benchmark datasets, confirming its effectiveness in facilitating information transfer. Ablation studies and further experiments reveal that UniGRF not only promotes efficient collaboration between stages but also achieves synchronized optimization. UniGRF provides an effective, scalable, and compatible framework for generative recommendation systems.