Make It Long, Keep It Fast: End-to-End 10K Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Billion-Scale Douyin Recommendation

Lin Guan; Jia-Qi Yang; Zhishan Zhao; Beichuan Zhang; Bo Sun; Xuanyuan Luo; Jinan Ni; Xiaowen Li; Yuhang Qi; Zhifang Fan; Hangyu Wang; Qiwei Chen; Yi Cheng; Feng Zhang; Xiao Yang

arXiv · 2511.06077

Make It Long, Keep It Fast: End-to-End 10K Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Billion-Scale Douyin Recommendation

Lin Guan·Jia-Qi Yang·Zhishan Zhao·Beichuan Zhang·Bo Sun·Xuanyuan Luo·Jinan Ni·Xiaowen Li·Yuhang Qi·Zhifang Fan·Hangyu Wang·Qiwei Chen·Yi Cheng·Feng Zhang·Xiao Yang

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Abstract

Short-video recommenders such as Douyin must exploit extremely long user behavior histories without breaking latency or cost budgets. We present an end-to-end industrial recommender system that scales long-sequence recommendation modeling to 10K-length histories in production. First, we introduce Stacked Target-to-History Cross Attention (STCA), which replaces history self-attention with stacked cross-attention from the target to the history, reducing complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length and enabling efficient end-to-end training over long user behavior sequences. Second, we propose Request Level Batching (RLB), a user-centric batching scheme that aggregates multiple targets for the same user/request to share the user-side encoding, substantially lowering sequence-related storage, communication, and compute without changing the learning objective. Third, we design a length-extrapolative training strategy -- train on shorter windows, infer on much longer ones -- so the model generalizes to 10K-scale histories without additional training cost. Across offline and online experiments, we observe predictable, monotonic gains as we scale history length and model capacity, mirroring the scaling law behavior observed in large language models. Deployed at full traffic on Douyin, our system delivers significant improvements on key engagement metrics while meeting production latency, demonstrating a practical path to scaling end-to-end ultra-long sequence recommendation to the 10K regime.

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Lin Guan, Jia-Qi Yang, Zhishan Zhao, Beichuan Zhang, Bo Sun, Xuanyuan Luo, Jinan Ni, Xiaowen Li, Yuhang Qi, Zhifang Fan, Hangyu Wang, Qiwei Chen, Yi Cheng, Feng Zhang, Xiao Yang. 2026-05-19. Make It Long, Keep It Fast: End-to-End 10K Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Billion-Scale Douyin Recommendation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06077

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