MTGRBoost: Boosting Large-scale Generative Recommendation Models in Meituan

Abstract: Recommendation is crucial for both user experience and company revenue, and generative recommendation models (GRMs) are shown to produce quality recommendations recently. However, existing systems are limited by insufficient functionality support and inefficient implementations for training GRMs in industrial scenarios. As such, we introduce MTGRBoost as an efficient and scalable system for GRM training. Specifically, to handle the real-time insert/delete of sparse embedding entries, MTGRBoost employs dynamic hash tables to replace static tables. To improve efficiency, MTGRBoost conducts dynamic sequence balancing to address the computation load imbalances among GPUs and adopts embedding ID deduplication alongside automatic table merging to accelerate embedding lookup. MTGRBoost also incorporates implementation optimizations including checkpoint resuming, mixed precision training, gradient accumulation, and operator fusion. Extensive experiments show that MTGRBoost improves training throughput by $1.6 \times$ -- $2.4\times$ while achieving good scalability when running over 100 GPUs. MTGRBoost has been deployed for many applications in Meituan and is now handling hundreds of millions of requests on a daily basis.