RecSoup: Efficient Model Merging Approach for Controllable Multi-Objective Recommendation

Multi-objective re-ranking has become a critical component of modern multi-stage recommender systems, as it tasked to balance multiple conflicting objectives such as accuracy, diversity, and fairness. Existing multi-objective re-ranking methods typically optimize aggregate objectives at the item level using static or handcrafted preference weights. This design overlooks that users inherently exhibit Pareto-optimal preferences at the intent level, reflecting personalized trade-offs among objectives rather than fixed weight combinations. Moreover, most approaches treat re-ranking task for each user as an isolated problem, and repeatedly learn the preferences from scratch. Such a paradigm not only incurs high computational cost, but also ignores the fact that users often share similar preference trade-off structures across objectives. Inspired by the existence of homogeneous multi-objective optimization spaces where Pareto-optimal patterns are transferable, we propose PreferRec, a novel framework that explicitly models and transfers Pareto preferences across users. Specifically, PreferRec is built upon three tightly coupled components: Preference-Aware Pareto Learning aims to capture user intrinsic trade-offs among multiple conflicting objectives at the intent level. By learning Pareto preference representations from re-ranking populations, this component explicitly models how users prioritize different objectives under diverse contexts. Knowledge-Guided Transfer facilitates efficient cross-user knowledge transfer by distilling shared optimization patterns across homogeneous optimization spaces. The transferred knowledge is then used to guide solution selection and personalized re-ranking, biasing the optimization process toward high-quality regions of the Pareto front while preserving user-specific preference characteristics.

Model merging combines trained models directly in weight space, offering a compute-efficient alternative to additional fine-tuning. Selecting merge parameters is nevertheless difficult because downstream evaluations are expensive, gradients are unavailable, and source capabilities can conflict. We formulate merge-parameter selection as a black-box multi-objective optimization problem and introduce MOBO-Merge, a merge-operator agnostic framework that uses multi-objective Bayesian optimization to approximate the Pareto front under a limited evaluation budget. We evaluate Qwen3-4B and Llama-3.1-8B in two-model instruction-math and three-model instruction-math-code settings using Linear, SLERP, TIES, and block-wise merge operators. On held-out benchmark partitions, MOBO-Merge obtains higher mean hypervolume than random search in 11 of 12 reported comparisons. The gain is small for one-dimensional Linear interpolation but substantially larger for several TIES, block-wise, and three-objective searches. No merge operator is uniformly best: TIES leads in three of four family-setting combinations, whereas Block-Linear 4x is strongest for the Llama three-model merge. These results show that multi-objective Bayesian optimization is valuable as a search layer for expressive merge parameterizations.

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.