mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

UniDot: A Unified Network for Sequence Modeling and Feature Interaction in Large-scale Recommendation

arXiv 2608.16797 ↗First posted 17 Aug 2026cs.IR cs.AIcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial recommenders rely on two model families that have evolved largely independently: feature-interaction models over multi-field user/item features, and sequential models over user-behavior histories. Production systems couple them only loosely. To unify the two, we present UniDot, a novel architecture for post-click conversion prediction built from the factorization-machine (FM) point of view: the embedding inner product---which powers collaborative filtering and lets a recommender generalize to unseen user--item pairs---is the same primitive as attention's query dot key scoring, so a single dot-product of tokens can underlie both feature interaction and sequence modeling. UniDot tokenizes non-sequential fields and multi-domain behavioral sequences into one shared token space and stacks a single macro-block in which a token-mixing bus and a sequence-retrieval bus (item tokens cross-attending the histories) run in parallel and exchange state each layer through an MLP-Mixer fusion, while an FM Highway carries explicit per-layer dot-product interactions around the residual stack directly to the classifier. The sequence side is embedded once per forward pass and shared by all consumers, bounding inference latency. Trained with a dual sparse/dense (Adagrad + Muon) optimizer, an auxiliary conversion-delay head, and multi-path mutual learning, UniDot finished as the runner-up on the Industrial track of the TAAC KDD Cup 2026.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 21 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.

Builds on

21 of 34 references.

References · 21

  1. 2015NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognitioncited by 941
  2. 2016Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systemscited by 747
  3. 2017DeepFM: A Factorization-Machine based Neural Network for CTR Predictioncited by 676
  4. 2017Deep Mutual Learningcited by 628
  5. 2025Muon is Scalable for LLM Trainingcited by 428
  6. 2017Deep & Cross Network for Ad Click Predictionscited by 393
  7. 2018Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Predictioncited by 338
  8. 2020DCN V2: Improved Deep & Cross Network and Practical Lessons for Web-scale Learning to Rank Systemscited by 327
  9. 2018AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networkscited by 320
  10. 2018xDeepFM: Combining Explicit and Implicit Feature Interactions for Recommender Systemscited by 278
  11. 2020Search-based User Interest Modeling with Lifelong Sequential Behavior Data for Click-Through Rate Predictioncited by 177
  12. 2019FiBiNET: Combining Feature Importance and Bilinear feature Interaction for Click-Through Rate Predictioncited by 83
9 more
  1. 2025LONGER: Scaling Up Long Sequence Modeling in Industrial Recommenderscited by 47
  2. 2021End-to-End User Behavior Retrieval in Click-Through RatePrediction Modelcited by 45
  3. 2025OneTrans: Unified Feature Interaction and Sequence Modeling with One Transformer in Industrial Recommendercited by 35
  4. 2018NeXtVLAD: An Efficient Neural Network to Aggregate Frame-level Features for Large-scale Video Classificationcited by 24
  5. 2023Temporal Interest Network for User Response Predictioncited by 9
  6. 2026Kunlun: Establishing Scaling Laws for Massive-Scale Recommendation Systems through Unified Architecture Designcited by 8
  7. 2026UniMixer: A Unified Architecture for Scaling Laws in Recommendation Systemscited by 7
  8. 2024Mutual Learning for Finetuning Click-Through Rate Prediction Modelscited by 1
  9. 2026SlimPer: Make Personalization Model Slim and Smartcited by 1

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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