SIGMA: A Semantic-Grounded Instruction-Driven Generative Multi-Task Recommender at AliExpress

Abstract: With the rapid evolution of LLMs, generative recommendation is gradually reshaping the paradigm of recommender systems. However, most existing methods are still confined to the interaction-driven next-item prediction paradigm, failing to rapidly adapt to evolving trends or address diverse recommendation tasks along with business-specific requirements in real-world scenarios. To this end, we present SIGMA, a Semantic-Grounded Instruction-Driven Generative Multi-Task Recommender at AliExpress. Specifically, we first ground item entities in general semantics via a unified latent space capturing both semantic and collaborative relations. Building upon this, we develop a hybrid item tokenization method for precise modeling and efficient generation. Moreover, we construct a large-scale multi-task SFT dataset to empower SIGMA to fulfill various recommendation demands via instruction-following. Finally, we design a three-step item generation procedure integrated with an adaptive probabilistic fusion mechanism to calibrate the output distributions based on task-specific requirements for recommendation accuracy and diversity. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate the effectiveness of SIGMA.