GRAM-V2: Generative Reasoning and Ranking Alignment for Large-Scale E-commerce Search

Chunyuan Yuan, Ming Pang, Yiming Deng, Xiaoyu He, Zheng Fang, Donghao Xie, Fanyi Qu, Changping Peng, Ching Law


Abstract
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task for e-commerce advertising systems. However, industrial ranking models still rely on sparse IDs and historical behavior signals, which limits their generalization to cold-start products, long-tail queries, and complex user intents. Although large language models (LLMs) provide strong semantic understanding and can generate behavioral rationales, directly using them for online ranking is impractical under strict latency constraints.

We propose GRAM-V2, a rationale-supervised ranking framework that transfers LLM-generated behavioral rationales into an efficient CTR model. GRAM-V2 uses a Teacher LLM to generate click-oriented rationales, distills them into a lightweight Student LLM, and aligns a two-tower CTR model with the Student’s representations and rationale signals. During online serving, GRAM-V2 uses only distilled representations and cached item embeddings, without generating rationales autoregressively. Large-scale offline experiments and online A/B testing show that GRAM-V2 improves CTR prediction accuracy, CTR, and advertising revenue while satisfying production latency constraints.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-industry.106
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pepa Atanasova, Gholamreza Haffari, Minghan Wang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1830–1839
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.106/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chunyuan Yuan, Ming Pang, Yiming Deng, Xiaoyu He, Zheng Fang, Donghao Xie, Fanyi Qu, Changping Peng, and Ching Law. 2026. GRAM-V2: Generative Reasoning and Ranking Alignment for Large-Scale E-commerce Search. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 1830–1839, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GRAM-V2: Generative Reasoning and Ranking Alignment for Large-Scale E-commerce Search (Yuan et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.106.pdf