Towards Efficient Whole Page Ranking with One-Pass Inference

Qi Xu, Zhigang Hua, Zijie Lei, Yan Xie, Jizhe Zhang +8

Whole-page ranking jointly optimizes advertisements and organic content to balance business outcomes and user engagement under complex layout and business constraints. Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches enable efficient page generation but typically score candidate items independently of previously selected items, limiting their ability to capture order-dependent interactions. Autoregressive (AR) methods address this limitation through sequential conditioning, but incur substantial inference overhead that challenges large-scale deployment. Bridging this quality-efficiency gap remains a challenge in industrial whole-page ranking. We propose Multi-Item Scoring (MIS), a prefix-aware NAR-style framework that incorporates sequential context into efficient multi-item scoring. MIS integrates global candidate interactions, localized prefix conditioning, and position-aware scoring within a shared representation architecture. By computing reusable representations once per request and performing lightweight prefix-conditioned scoring during constrained beam search, MIS captures important sequential dependencies without repeated full-model inference. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and…