SIREN: Unified Multi-Granularity Semantic Interaction for Multi-Modal Lifelong User Interest Modeling

Abstract: Industrial recommender systems increasingly leverage lifelong user behavior histories and rich multi-modal content to capture evolving user preferences. However, effectively integrating multi-modal features into lifelong interest modeling remains challenging due to the inherent misalignment between multi-modal and collaborative spaces. Existing paradigms typically rely on separate modeling of multi-modal sequence and behavior sequence, and late fusion to alleviate the modality gap, which results in coarse-grained multi-modal representation and limited integration. In this paper, we propose SIREN, a unified multi-granularity semantic interaction framework for multi-modal lifelong user interest modeling. In the General Search Unit stage, we introduce two alternative retrieval strategies: multi-modal similarity-based soft retrieval for retrieval effectiveness, and Semantic ID (SemID)-based hard retrieval for efficient industrial serving. For the Exact Search Unit stage, we explicitly incorporate target-aware relevance via coarse similarity buckets and fine-grained prefix-encoded SemIDs, enabling unified interaction with collaborative ID features within the target-conditioned transformer architecture. Extensive experiments on the offline dataset demonstrate that SIREN achieves a state-of-the-art GAUC. Online A/B tests further demonstrate consistent GMV gains across multiple production scenarios, including +2.28% in Weixin Moments, +3.87% in Weixin Official Accounts, and +1.61% in Weixin Channels. From July 2025, SIREN has been fully launched for full-traffic serving in Tencent's advertising platform.