PailitaoMMSearch2.0 Technical Report: Scaling Generative Retrieval to Unified End-to-End Multimodal Search

Generative retrieval models have been increasingly adopted in search and recommendation systems. However, industrial generative retrieval models are commonly specialized to a fixed online scenario: they learn from scenario-specific interactions, support a narrow set of query forms and retrieval objectives. We study how to remove these couplings and build a unified end-to-end multimodal search system for open-ended image--text queries, heterogeneous shopping intents, and online scenarios with different resource constraints. We present \textbf{PailitaoMMSearch}, which directly generates product Semantic IDs from a raw query image and free-form instruction and scales along three dimensions. \textbf{Data scaling} uses a reusable toolset that can be composed into intent- and lifecycle-specific workflows for cold-start synthesis, quality control, real-traffic refinement, and continuous data production. \textbf{Intent scaling} progressively equips one model with e-commerce product knowledge, multiple retrieval relations, and adjustable reasoning budgets through continual pre-training (CPT), mixed-budget supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and unified reinforcement learning (RL). The RL stage combines intent-balanced optimization and Sample--Beam rollouts aligned with multi-candidate serving. \textbf{Scenario scaling} exposes quality--cost operating points across model capacity and reasoning budget. The system is deployed in multimodal search applications on Taobao Pailitao. A controlled online A/B test reports statistically significant improvements, including item page views $\textbf{+17.90\%}$, transactions $\textbf{+27.04\%}$, and gross merchandise value $\textbf{+8.94\%}$.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.36958
Primary Topic
Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Type
preprint
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preprint

PailitaoMMSearch2.0 Technical Report: Scaling Generative Retrieval to Unified End-to-End Multimodal Search

Zesheng Zhou, Jingqian Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Renchun You et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
preprint

PailitaoMMSearch2.0 Technical Report: Scaling Generative Retrieval to Unified End-to-End Multimodal Search

Zesheng Zhou, Jingqian Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Renchun You, Lianyu Du, Bo Zheng, Zihan Gong, Xiaohan Ye, Yunmeng Shu, Bocheng Chen, Haihong Tang, Xu Chen
preprint en

Abstract

Generative retrieval models have been increasingly adopted in search and recommendation systems. However, industrial generative retrieval models are commonly specialized to a fixed online scenario: they learn from scenario-specific interactions, support a narrow set of query forms and retrieval objectives. We study how to remove these couplings and build a unified end-to-end multimodal search system for open-ended image--text queries, heterogeneous shopping intents, and online scenarios with different resource constraints. We present \textbf{PailitaoMMSearch}, which directly generates product Semantic IDs from a raw query image and free-form instruction and scales along three dimensions. \textbf{Data scaling} uses a reusable toolset that can be composed into intent- and lifecycle-specific workflows for cold-start synthesis, quality control, real-traffic refinement, and continuous data production. \textbf{Intent scaling} progressively equips one model with e-commerce product knowledge, multiple retrieval relations, and adjustable reasoning budgets through continual pre-training (CPT), mixed-budget supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and unified reinforcement learning (RL). The RL stage combines intent-balanced optimization and Sample--Beam rollouts aligned with multi-candidate serving. \textbf{Scenario scaling} exposes quality--cost operating points across model capacity and reasoning budget. The system is deployed in multimodal search applications on Taobao Pailitao. A controlled online A/B test reports statistically significant improvements, including item page views $\textbf{+17.90\%}$, transactions $\textbf{+27.04\%}$, and gross merchandise value $\textbf{+8.94\%}$.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
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PailitaoMMSearch2.0 Technical Report: Scaling Generative Retrieval to Unified End-to-End Multimodal Search — Zesheng Zhou, Jingqian Zhao, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS