Teng Shi
Publications
ShopX: A Foundation Model for Intent-to-Item Fulfillment in Agentic Shopping
The wave of AI-native applications is moving shopping beyond page- and feed-based browsing toward intent-driven experiences orchestrated by LLM agents. A common design wraps an LLM around existing search and recommendation pipelines, forcing complex intents through low-bandwidth retrieval or ranking interfaces and leaving a gap between language understanding and item-space fulfillment. Generative recommendation gives LLMs a direct item-space interface through semantic IDs (SIDs), but existing models mainly generate candidates for retrieval rather than translate flexible intents into item-space outcomes. We propose ShopX to address this bottleneck by unifying intent understanding, execution planning, and flexible SID-native item-space operations into a single foundation model. We deploy ShopX in agentic shopping workflows through a model-native item-fulfillment framework with a serving harness that defines a model-facing action protocol and exposes support surfaces for context access, catalog grounding, and state management. Within this framework, ShopX plans and composes SID-based item-space operations such as SID beam-search retrieval, listwise ranking, or product bundling. This model-centric design reduces lossy hand-offs between agent orchestration and item-space execution. To build ShopX, we design semantically recoverable, LLM-operable SIDs and a training recipe that equips a general LLM for flexible multi-turn item-space fulfillment while retaining the knowledge and instruction-following abilities needed by a shopping agent. We evaluate the ShopX framework against tool-mediated agentic systems on single- and multi-turn fulfillment tasks derived from anonymized Taobao production logs, showing that model-native fulfillment improves overall framework behavior, especially on complex or ambiguous requests.
OneReason Technical Report
Generative recommendation models in the OneRec family have been widely deployed in many real-world services, such as short-video, live-streaming, advertising, and e-commerce. However, these generative models can only benefit from the scaling advantage, while their reasoning ability is hard to activate, since we cannot construct meaningful Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sequences consisting of itemic tokens only. Inspired by the success of the reasoning-style ``think before answer'' paradigm in the LLM field, we conduct preliminary studies (i.e., OneRec-Think, OpenOneRec) to explore reasoning capability in generative recommendation. Nevertheless, we notice an unexpected phenomenon: the thinking mode does not show advantages over the non-thinking mode. Drawing insights from recent findings on CoT robustness in multi-modal language models, we argue that effective reasoning in recommendation rests on two factors: perception, the ability to ground itemic tokens in their underlying language semantics, and cognition, the ability to reorganize a user's behavior sequence into coherent latent interest points. We therefore propose OneReason, which includes: (1) strong itemic token perception in pre-training, (2) a three-level cognition-enhanced CoT format for recommendation tasks in SFT, and (3) a specialize-then-unify training recipe in RL to enhance the thinking ability.
Bringing Model Editing to Generative Recommendation in Cold-Start Scenarios
Generative recommendation (GR) has shown strong potential for sequential recommendation in an end-to-end generation paradigm. However, existing GR models suffer from severe cold-start collapse: their recommendation accuracy on cold-start items can drop to near zero. Current solutions typically rely on retraining with cold-start interactions, which is hindered by sparse feedback, high computational cost, and delayed updates, limiting practical utility in rapidly evolving recommendation catalogs. Inspired by model editing in NLP, which enables training-free knowledge injection into large language models, we explore how to bring this paradigm to generative recommendation. This, however, faces two key challenges: GR lacks the explicit subject-object binding common in natural language, making targeted edits difficult; and GR does not exhibit stable token co-occurrence patterns, making the injection of multi-token item representations unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose GenRecEdit, a model editing framework tailored for generative recommendation. GenRecEdit explicitly models the relationship between the full sequence context and next-token generation, adopts iterative token-level editing to inject multi-token item representations, and introduces a one-to-one trigger mechanism to reduce interference among multiple edits during inference. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that GenRecEdit substantially improves recommendation performance on cold-start items while preserving the model's original recommendation quality. Moreover, it achieves these gains using only about 9.5% of the training time required for retraining, enabling more efficient and frequent model updates.