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
- Zesheng Zhou
- Jingqian Zhao
- Jinsong Lan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6890-4960)
- Renchun You
- Lianyu Du
- Bo Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2531-3383)
- Zihan Gong
- Xiaohan Ye
- Yunmeng Shu
- Bocheng Chen
- Haihong Tang
- Xu Chen
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