Climber: Toward Efficient Scaling Laws for Large Recommendation Models
Songpei Xu, Shijia Wang, Da Guo, Xianwen Guo, Qiang Xiao, Bin Huang, Guanlin Wu, Chuanjiang Luo · 2025
Transformer-based generative models have achieved remarkable success across domains with various scaling law manifestations. However, our extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges when applying Transformer to recommendation systems: (1) Transformer scaling is not ideal with increased computational resources, due to structural incompatibilities with recommendation-specific features such as multi-source data heterogeneity; (2) critical online inference latency constraints (tens of milliseconds) that intensify with longer user behavior sequences and growing computational demands. We propose Climber, an efficient recommendation framework comprising two synergistic components: the model architecture for efficient scaling and the co-designed acceleration techniques. Our proposed model adopts two core innovations: (1) multi-scale sequence extraction that achieves a time complexity reduction by a constant factor, enabling more efficient scaling with sequence length; (2) dynamic temperature modulation adapting attention distributions to the multi-scenario and multi-behavior patterns. Complemented by acceleration techniques, Climber achieves a 5.15× throughput gain without performance degradation by adopting a ''single user, multiple item'' batched processing and memory-efficient Key-Value caching.