UniMixer: A Unified Architecture for Scaling Laws in Recommendation Systems

Scaling recommendation models is a central challenge in recommender systems. Recently, RankMixer has emerged as an effective solution, operating on a unified token representation and alternating between token mixing and per-token feedforward networks (P-FFNs) to achieve scalable performance. However, RankMixer suffers from embedding collapse, where learned representations have low effective rank, limiting expressivity and underutilizing the expanded representation space. Through empirical analysis and theoretical insights, we identify rigid token mixing and P-FFN modules as the primary causes of this phenomenon, jointly inducing a damped oscillatory trajectory in effective-rank evolution across layers. To address it, we propose RankElastor, a novel architecture that produces spectrum-robust representations with provable collapse mitigation. RankElastor introduces two components: (i) parameterized full mixing, which enables expressive token mixing with improved spectral robustness; and (ii) GLU-improved P-FFNs, which stabilize representation spectra through GLU-style FFN modules. Extensive experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate that RankElastor consistently improves recommendation performance, mitigates embedding collapse, and exhibits robust scaling behavior. Code is available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/vasile-paskardlgm/RankElastor

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired a surge of scaling research in industrial search, advertising, and recommendation systems. However, existing approaches focus mainly on architectural improvements, overlooking the critical synergy between data and architecture design. We observe that scaling model parameters alone exhibits diminishing returns, and that the performance degradation caused by complex heterogeneous data distributions is often irrecoverable through model design alone. In this paper, we propose UniScale, a novel co-design framework that jointly optimizes data and architecture to unlock the full potential of model scaling. UniScale includes two core parts: (1) ES$^3$ (Entire-Space Sample System), a high-quality data scaling system that expands the training signal beyond conventional sampling strategies through intra-domain expansion with hierarchical label attribution and cross-domain searchification; and (2) HHSFT (Heterogeneous Hierarchical Sample Fusion Transformer), a novel architecture that effectively models the complex heterogeneous distribution of scaled data via Heterogeneous Hierarchical Feature Interaction and Entire Space User Interest Fusion, thereby surpassing the performance ceiling of structure-only model tuning. Extensive experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate that UniScale achieves significant improvements and exhibits clear scaling trends. Online A/B tests on a real-world E-commerce search platform confirm that UniScale consistently outperforms strong production baselines, achieving 1.70% and 2.04% increases in user purchase and Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).

Recommender systems (RecSys) are increasingly emphasizing scaling, leveraging larger architectures and more interaction data to improve personalization. Yet, despite the optimizer's pivotal role in training, modern RecSys pipelines almost universally default to Adam/AdamW, with limited scrutiny of whether these choices are truly optimal for recommendation. In this work, we revisit optimizer design for scalable recommendation and introduce MuonRec, the first framework that brings the recently proposed Muon optimizer to RecSys training. Muon performs orthogonalized momentum updates for 2D weight matrices via Newton-Schulz iteration, promoting diverse update directions and improving optimization efficiency. We develop an open-source training recipe for recommendation models and evaluate it across both traditional sequential recommenders and modern generative recommenders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuonRec reduces converged training steps by an average of 32.4% while simultaneously improving final ranking quality. Specifically, MuonRec yields consistent relative gains in NDCG@10, averaging 12.6% across all settings, with particularly pronounced improvements in generative recommendation models. These results consistently outperform strong Adam/AdamW baselines, positioning Muon as a promising new optimizer standard for RecSys training. Our code is available.