Yandex Introduces Sona: A Single Generative Recommender That Replaces Entire Recommendation Cascade

תקציר מקורי באנגליתMost production recommenders are cascades. Candidate generators feed a pre-ranker, which feeds a heavy ranker built on hundreds of engineered features. Yandex’s Sona Technical Report describes a different design. Sona is a generative AI model that brings candidate generation and ranking into a single system, replacing the multiple stages typically used in recommendation pipelines. Yandex tested the model in a seven-day live production experiment on its smart speakers. In an online A/B test, it replaced more than 15 candidate generators, the pre-ranking stage, and the ranking stage with one served transformer. What Problem Does Sona Solve? Cascades split one decision across separately trained models. Each stage optimizes its own objective, and the ranker only sees what upstream stages