Not Only NTP: Extending Training Signal Coverage for Generative Recommendation
arXiv:2607.12277
The paper introduces NONTP, a method that augments next‑token prediction for recommendation models with temporal contrastive learning and trans‑domain learning to capture longer‑range and cross‑domain patterns, achieving significant gains on industrial and public datasets.
Abstract
Next-Token Prediction (NTP) carries two structural training signal limitations. First, NTP optimizes for single-step prediction only, placing no supervised pressure on learning longer-range behavioral structure -- we term this \textbf{temporal locality}. Second, in multi-domain sequences, each target item embedding receives gradient updates exclusively from the immediately preceding hidden state, with no explicit gradient pathway from cross-domain context -- we term this \textbf{spatial locality}. We propose \textbf{NONTP}, extending NTP's signal coverage along both dimensions through two auxiliary objectives. \textbf{TCL (Temporal Contrastive Learning)} uses a BYOL-style EMA teacher with InfoNCE to align hidden states against a -step future trajectory in representation space. \textbf{TDL (Trans-Domain Learning)} mean-pools cross-domain hidden states and predicts through the shared prediction head, opening a second gradient pathway with no additional parameters. Both are discarded at inference: zero overhead. On a four-domain Meituan industrial dataset (full ranking), NONTP achieves HR@10 +34.3\% over NTP and +18.3\% over MBGR. On the public Amazon Movie-Book-CDs benchmark, HR@10 +2.8\% and NDCG@10 +3.7\%. Online A/B tests confirm CTR +1.8\% and GMV +2.1\% (both ). Ablation studies confirm each component contributes independently, with gradient conflict analyzed as a direction for future work.