# HiGR: Industrial-Scale Hierarchical Generative Slate Recommendation Framework in Tencent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24787/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07691/) (2024)
- [OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18965/) (2025)
- [Learnable Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07314/) (2024)
- [KuaiRec: A Fully-observed Dataset and Insights for Evaluating Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10842/) (2022)
- [OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11639/) (2025)
- [MTGR: Industrial-Scale Generative Recommendation Framework in Meituan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18654/) (2025)
- [OneTrans: Unified Feature Interaction and Sequence Modeling with One Transformer in Industrial Recommender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26104/) (2025)
- [FeedRec: News Feed Recommendation with Various User Feedbacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04903/) (2021)
- [Beyond Greedy Ranking: Slate Optimization via List-CVAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01682/) (2018)
- [PrefRec: Recommender Systems with Human Preferences for Reinforcing Long-term User Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02779/) (2022)
- [Generative Flow Network for Listwise Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02239/) (2023)
- [OnePiece: Bringing Context Engineering and Reasoning to Industrial Cascade Ranking System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18091/) (2025)
- [Generative Slate Recommendation with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08632/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation through Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17171/) (2024)
- [From IDs to Semantics: A Generative Framework for Cross-Domain Recommendation with Adaptive Semantic Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08006/) (2025)
- [GPR: Towards a Generative Pre-trained One-Model Paradigm for Large-Scale Advertising Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10138/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [F-GRPO: Factorized Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Unified Candidate Generation and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12995/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. While recent generative recommendation methods have shown strong potential in modeling item sequences with semantic IDs, directly applying them to industrial-scale slate recommendation faces a fundamental disconnect: entangled SID spaces confound high-level list planning, fine-grained autoregressive decoding over long sequences limits semantic planning efficiency, and token-level objectives misalign with holistic slate quality. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an industrial-scale hierarchical generative framework for slate recommendation that bridges this disconnect through a co-designed pipeline. First, HiGR learns structured SIDs via a Prefix-Contrastive Residual Quantized VAE (PCRQ-VAE). By enforcing high-level prefixes to capture shared semantics, PCRQ-VAE creates a controllable discrete space that acts as a prerequisite for efficient planning. Leveraging this structured space, our Hierarchical Slate Decoder (HSD) shifts autoregressive modeling from entangled token-level decoding to coarse-grained preference embeddings. This design significantly reduces inference latency while allowing explicit global slate structure planning. Finally, this stable planning space enables an ORPO-based listwise alignment mechanism to optimize triple-objective implicit feedback-ranking fidelity, genuine user interest, and diversity. Extensive offline experiments show that HiGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a 5× inference speedup. Online A/B tests on Tencent platforms further improve watch time by 1.22% and video plays by 1.73%. HiGR has been deployed on multiple Tencent platform surfaces, serving hundreds of millions of users and proving its industrial-scale applicability.