Pinterest’s UniPinRec and the benefits of unified retrieval and ranking

In May, Pinterest released a paper introducing UniPinRec, a system that unifies candidate retrieval and ranking for Pins within a single model while preserving the traditional multi-stage recommendation funnel. The authors call this a "generative" approach, which is understandable, but it slightly overstates the model's scope. UniPinRec differs from the generative frameworks I describe in […]