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%, transactions +27.04%, and gross merchandise value +8.94%.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. PailitaoMMSearch2.0 overview. Data scaling expands supervision, intent scaling learns a unified policy, and scenario scaling exposes the learned capability under different resource envelopes.
Workflow
Coarse
Fine
QTG
CoT
QC
Cold-start synthesis
✓
✓
✓
∘
✓
Real-traffic refinement
∘
✓
∘
∘
✓
Continuous production
✓
✓
∘
∘
✓
Table 1. Tool composition for the three data-production workflows. QTG and QC denote Query-Text-Gen and Quality-Control.
Similar
Editing
Matching
Proxy/cold-start training
24M
24M
12M
Refined real-traffic training
1M
8M
1M
Automatic test
502
772
371
Evaluator calibration
40,000
20,000
40,000
Table 2. Dataset statistics for training, automatic evaluation, and evaluator calibration.
Intent
Good Prec. ( ≥2 )
Excellent Prec. ( =3 )
Similar
0.924
0.936
Editing
0.935
0.939
Matching
0.932
0.936
Table 3. Automatic-evaluator precision against disjoint human annotations.
System
Similar
Editing
Matching
Macro
Avg. RT (ms)
GPU devices
NDCG
GR
ER
NDCG
GR
ER
NDCG
GR
ER
NDCG
GR
ER
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
0.885
74.5%
47.5%
0.894
66.7%
47.9%
0.892
74.4%
61.1%
0.890
71.9%
52.2%
1,075
4
GPT6-luna
0.883
71.3%
44.7%
0.859
60.0%
43.5%
0.930
80.4%
67.3%
0.891
70.6%
51.8%
3,646
–
Internal recall-and-ranking pipeline
0.874
70.6%
54.1%
0.903
64.0%
50.1%
0.745
51.4%
44.2%
0.841
62.0%
49.5%
780
–
PailitaoMMSearch2.0-0.8B low-think
0.887
64.3%
44.6%
0.877
51.2%
35.5%
0.944
81.1%
70.9%
0.903
65.5%
50.3%
187
1
PailitaoMMSearch2.0-2B low-think
0.907
70.6%
50.5%
0.891
57.4%
40.6%
0.955
84.7%
74.3%
0.918
70.9%
55.1%
278
1
Table 4. Offline retrieval quality and serving cost across the three intents. Higher NDCG, GR, and ER are better; lower average response time (RT) and fewer GPU devices are better. Best and second-best quality and RT results are shown in bold and underlined, respectively.
Data volume
Data setting
Sim. ER
Edit ER
Match ER
Macro ER
30%
–
40.48%
33.73%
64.76%
46.32% (−2.71pp)
70%
–
43.91%
35.29%
64.24%
47.81% (−1.22pp)
100%
–
45.56%
35.43%
66.09%
49.03%
100%
w/o real traffic
44.46%
34.57%
65.71%
48.25% (−0.78pp)
100%
w/o real traffic w/o quality control
44.88%
34.27%
64.77%
47.97% (−1.06pp)
Table 5. Effect of training-data scale and data-production components on the 2 B SFT model.
Initialization
Macro GR
Macro ER
Base VLM + SFT
62.5% (−0.8pp)
47.8% (−1.2pp)
CPT + SFT
63.3%
49.0%
Table 6. Effect of continual pre-training under a fixed downstream SFT configuration.
SFT intent mixture
Similar ER
Editing ER
Matching ER
Editing only
–
33.11%
–
Similar + Editing
44.63%
35.88%
–
Similar + Editing + Matching
45.56%
35.43%
66.09%
Table 7. Cross-intent transfer as the SFT supervision mixture expands.
Training setting
Similar ER
Editing ER
Matching ER
Macro ER
SFT
45.56%
35.43%
66.09%
49.03% (−5.97pp)
Standard RL
46.79%
37.37%
73.93%
52.70% (−2.3pp)
Sample–Beam RL
49.65%
40.48%
74.88%
55.00%
Table 8. Effects of unified RL and Sample–Beam rollouts under matched initialization, intent mixture, and reward evaluation.
Figure 2. Case study of the three reasoning budgets on representative queries. No-think answers directly, Low-think isolates the decisive visual and textual constraints, and High-think adds a longer trace. The examples illustrate the effect of the extra reasoning.
Params
Budget
Similar ER
Editing ER
Matching ER
Macro ER
Avg. tokens
RT (ms)
0.8 B
No-think
46.22%
35.67%
70.45%
50.78%
0
136
Low-think
44.55%
35.51%
70.87%
50.31%
9.0
187
High-think
43.51%
35.09%
70.21%
49.60%
51.7
326
2 B
No-think
49.71%
40.70%
73.45%
54.62%
0
210
Low-think
50.54%
40.60%
74.25%
55.13%
8.6
278
High-think
49.65%
40.48%
74.88%
55.00%
54.4
544
Table 9. Effects of model scale and inference-time reasoning budget on retrieval quality, reasoning tokens, and response time. Quality columns report ER.