[2603.22231] One Model, Two Markets: Bid-Aware Generative Recommendation

Computer Science > Information Retrieval arXiv:2603.22231 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:One Model, Two Markets: Bid-Aware Generative Recommendation Authors:Yanchen Jiang, Zhe Feng, Christopher P. Mah, Aranyak Mehta, Di Wang View a PDF of the paper titled One Model, Two Markets: Bid-Aware Generative Recommendation, by Yanchen Jiang and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Generative Recommender Systems using semantic ids, such as TIGER (Rajput et al., 2023), have emerged as a widely adopted competitive paradigm in sequential recommendation. However, existing architectures are designed solely for semantic retrieval and do not address concerns such as monetization via ad revenue and incorporation of bids for commercial retrieval. We propose GEM-Rec, a unified framework that integrates commercial relevance and monetization objectives directly into the generative sequence. We introduce control tokens to decouple the decision of whether to show an ad from which item to show. This allows the model to learn valid placement patterns directly from interaction logs, which inherently reflect past successful ad placements. Complementing this, we devise a Bid-Aware Decoding mechanism that handles real-time pricing, injecting bids directly into the inference process to steer the generation toward high-value items. We prove that this approach guarantees allocation monotonicity, ensuring that higher bids weakly increase an ad's likelihood of being shown without req...