用MLP替代Transformer加速生成式推荐,推理快8.74倍
MLPs are Efficient Distilled Generative Recommenders

- 用单次操作捕捉用户全局上下文,跳过重复注意力计算
- 推理速度提升8.74倍,精度与原模型相当
- 可适配不同模型和分词器,适合工业部署
生成式推荐模型使用语义ID(SIDs)展现强大潜力,但其实际部署受限于束搜索解码带来的高延迟。本文发现,标准的注意力密集型Transformer解码器对此任务存在结构冗余:由于SIDs具有层次性,首个标记后预测难度急剧下降,导致重复注意力计算无意义。基于此洞察,我们提出SID-MLP,一种以MLP为核心的轻量级蒸馏框架,从根本上简化了生成式推荐的解码范式。该方法通过单次操作捕获全局用户上下文,与序列标记预测解耦;再将复杂的自回归教师模型蒸馏为位置相关的MLP头,消除密集注意力开销,同时保留前缀与上下文依赖。大量实验表明,SID-MLP在保持教师模型精度的同时,实现8.74倍的推理加速。该蒸馏策略可作为即插即用的加速模块,适配多种骨干网络与分词设置。此外,我们提出SID-MLP++,将Transformer编码器也替换为MLP,进一步降低延迟。最终,本工作揭示了解码端MLP蒸馏是结构化SID推荐的有效加速路径,而完整编码器替换则提供额外的速度-精度权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Generative recommendation models employing Semantic IDs (SIDs) exhibit strong potential, yet their practical deployment is bottlenecked by the high inference latency of beam-expanded autoregressive decoding. In this work, we identify that standard attention-heavy Transformer decoders represent a structural overkill for this task: the hierarchical nature of SIDs makes prediction difficulty drops sharply after the first token, rendering repeated attention computations highly redundant. Driven by this insight, we propose SID-MLP, a lightweight MLP-centric distillation framework that fundamentally simplifies the decoding paradigm for GR. Instead of executing complex, step-by-step attention mechanisms, our approach captures the global user context in a single operation, decoupled from sequential token prediction. We then distill the heavy autoregressive teacher into position-specific MLP heads, eliminating the dense attention overhead while preserving prefix and context dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SID-MLP matches the accuracy of teacher models while accelerating inference by 8.74x. Crucially, this distillation strategy can serve as a plug-and-play accelerator for different backbones and tokenizer settings. Furthermore, we introduce SID-MLP++, extending our distillation framework to replace the Transformer encoder, unlocking further latency reductions. Ultimately, our work reveals that decoder-side MLPs distillation is an effective acceleration path for structured SID recommendation, while full encoder replacement offers an additional speed--accuracy trade-off.
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