cs.IROct 27, 2026

PailitaoMMSearch2.0 Technical Report: Scaling Generative Retrieval to Unified End-to-End Multimodal Search

Authors: Xiaohan Ye, Zihan Gong, Jingqian Zhao, Lianyu Du, Yunmeng Shu, Xu Chen, Zesheng Zhou, Renchun You, 

Organizations: Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba

Abstract

Generative retrieval models have been increasingly adopted in search and recommendation systems. However, industrial generative retrieval models are commonly specialized to a fixed online scenario: they learn from scenario-specific interactions, support a narrow set of query forms and retrieval objectives. We study how to remove these couplings and build a unified end-to-end multimodal search system for open-ended image--text queries, heterogeneous shopping intents, and online scenarios with different resource constraints. We present PailitaoMMSearch, which directly generates product Semantic IDs from a raw query image and free-form instruction and scales along three dimensions. Data scaling uses a reusable toolset that can be composed into intent- and lifecycle-specific workflows for cold-start synthesis, quality control, real-traffic refinement, and continuous data production. Intent scaling progressively equips one model with e-commerce product knowledge, multiple retrieval relations, and adjustable reasoning budgets through continual pre-training (CPT), mixed-budget supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and unified reinforcement learning (RL). The RL stage combines intent-balanced optimization and Sample--Beam rollouts aligned with multi-candidate serving. Scenario scaling exposes quality--cost operating points across model capacity and reasoning budget. The system is deployed in multimodal search applications on Taobao Pailitao. A controlled online A/B test reports statistically significant improvements, including item page views +17.90%\textbf{+17.90\%}, transactions +27.04%\textbf{+27.04\%}, and gross merchandise value +8.94%\textbf{+8.94\%}.

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