TokenMixer-Large: Scaling Up Large Ranking Models in Industrial Recommenders
cs.IR
/ Authors
Yuchen Jiang, Jie Zhu, Xintian Han, Hui Lu, Kunmin Bai, Mingyu Yang, Shikang Wu, Ruihao Zhang, Wenlin Zhao, Shipeng Bai
and 11 more authors
Sijin Zhou, Huizhi Yang, Tianyi Liu, Wenda Liu, Ziyan Gong, Haoran Ding, Zheng Chai, Deping Xie, Zhe Chen, Yuchao Zheng, Peng Xu
/ Abstract
While scaling laws for recommendation models have gained significant traction, existing architectures such as Wukong, HiFormer and DHEN, often struggle with sub-optimal designs and hardware under-utilization, limiting their practical scalability. Our previous TokenMixer architecture (introduced in RankMixer paper) addressed effectiveness and efficiency by replacing self-attention with a ightweight token-mixing operator; however, it faced critical bottlenecks in deeper configurations, including sub-optimal residual paths, vanishing gradients, incomplete MoE sparsification and constrained scalability. In this paper, we propose TokenMixer-Large, a systematically evolved architecture designed for extreme-scale recommendation. By introducing a mixing-and-reverting operation, inter-layer residuals and the auxiliary loss, we ensure stable gradient propagation even as model depth increases. Furthermore, we incorporate a Sparse Per-token MoE to enable efficient parameter expansion. TokenMixer-Large successfully scales its parameters to 7-billion and 15-billion on online traffic and offline experiments, respectively. Currently deployed in multiple scenarios at ByteDance, TokenMixer-Large has achieved significant offline and online performance gains, delivering an increase of +1.66\% in orders and +2.98\% in per-capita preview payment GMV for e-commerce, improving ADSS by +2.0\% in advertising and achieving a +1.4\% revenue growth for live streaming.