# OneTrans-V2: Unifying Retrieval, Pre-rank, and Fine-rank with One Transformer in Industrial Recommender

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28589/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MoE for recommender systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [MoE for recommender systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/moe-for-recommender-systems/)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial recommendation systems typically operate as a cascade of retrieval, pre-rank, and fine-rank, but these stages are usually trained and served as separate models, causing repeated user-sequence encoding, isolated optimization, and duplicated engineering effort. Building on OneTrans' model-level unification, we present OneTrans-V2, one Transformer that unifies the entire cascade. It encodes the user behavior sequence once as a shared context while preserving stage-specific candidate features and computation. Joint training lets the three stages reinforce one another and enables in-model knowledge distillation from fine-rank to pre-rank. We scale the shared backbone with sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE), which increases capacity with bounded activated computation, and stabilize scaling with μP-style parameterization. To consolidate objective-specific retrieval channels, we introduce Decision-Conditioned Generative Retrieval (DCGR). DCGR predicts a decision prefix describing the upcoming interaction and generates items conditioned on it, allowing business objectives to steer a single generative process. Finally, Sequence-Native Training (SNT) organizes training around each user's lifelong behavior sequence and amortizes its encoding across exposures. Deployed across all three stages of a large-scale industrial recommendation system, OneTrans-V2 improves gross merchandise value (GMV) by 9.74% and, with a co-designed serving stack, delivers 3.2× the throughput of the cascade it replaces under the same hardware budget.
