Towards Efficient Whole Page Ranking with One-Pass Inference

Abstract:Whole-page ranking jointly optimizes advertisements and organic content to balance business outcomes and user engagement under complex layout and business constraints. Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches enable efficient page generation but typically score candidate items independently of previously selected items, limiting their ability to capture order-dependent interactions. Autoregressive (AR) methods address this limitation through sequential conditioning, but incur substantial inference overhead that challenges large-scale deployment. Bridging this quality-efficiency gap remains a challenge in industrial whole-page ranking. We propose Multi-Item Scoring (MIS), a prefix-aware NAR-style framework that incorporates sequential context into efficient multi-item scoring. MIS integrates global candidate interactions, localized prefix conditioning, and position-aware scoring within a shared representation architecture. By computing reusable representations once per request and performing lightweight prefix-conditioned scoring during constrained beam search, MIS captures important sequential dependencies without repeated full-model inference. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and RL4RS demonstrate that MIS approaches the generation quality of an autoregressive CGA baseline while achieving 4.07x and 3.54x faster CPU decoding, respectively. In a randomized evaluation on a large-scale social-video platform, MIS improves the realization metric by 0.104% and watch time by 0.058%, while reducing ranking-service CPU consumption by 9.73%. These results demonstrate that prefix-aware multi-item scoring can narrow the quality gap between NAR and AR generation while retaining the efficiency required for industrial scalability. Submission history Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source Additional Features Audio Summary Current browse context: References & Citations Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Bookmark Institution arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.