Unlocking Scaling Law in Industrial Recommendation Systems with a Three-step Paradigm based Large User Model

Recent advancements in autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, largely driven by their scalability—commonly formalized as the scaling law. Inspired by these successes, there has been growing interest in adapting LLMs to recommendation systems (RecSys) by reformulating recommendation tasks as generative sequence modeling problems. However, existing End-to-End Generative Recommendation (E2E-GR) methods often sacrifice the practical advantages of traditional Deep Learning-based Recommendation Models (DLRMs)—including mature feature engineering, modular architectures, and production-grade optimization practices. This trade-off introduces critical challenges that hinder the effective application of scaling laws in industrial RecSys. In this paper, we present Large User Model (LUM), a scalable and production-aware framework that bridges the gap between generative modeling and industrial recommendation requirements. LUM addresses these limitations through a principled three-step paradigm, designed to preserve the flexibility of autoregressive generation while maintaining compatibility with real-world deployment constraints. Extensive experiments show that LUM outperforms state-of-the-art DLRMs and E2E-GR approaches across multiple benchmarks. Notably, LUM exhibits strong scalability: performance improves consistently as the model scales up to 7 billion parameters. Furthermore, LUM has been successfully deployed in a large-scale industrial application, where it delivered statistically significant gains in a live A/B test, demonstrating both its effectiveness and practical viability.