Sona: one transformer replaced our 15+ candidate generators, pre-ranker and ranker in an A/B test [R]

Yandex Music replaced its production recommender's 15+ candidate generators, pre-ranker and ranker with a single transformer model called Sona, according to an A/B test reported by the team. The company said the end-to-end generative recommender took over work previously split across specialized components.

Our production recommender at Yandex Music has 15+ candidate generators feeding pre-ranking and ranking models with hundreds of features. LLMs showed that one end-to-end model can take over work that used to be split across specialized components, and single-model generative recommenders have carrie