Chain Dimension Scaling: Communication-Efficient Loop-Style Scaling for Industrial Short-Video Ranking

Abstract

Industrial recommendation rankers keep scaling in width and depth to billions of parameters, but this increasingly incurs costs in parameter growth, distributed communication overhead, and training inefficiency. We introduce \underline{C}hain \underline{D}imension \underline{S}caling (CDS), a scaling strategy orthogonal to width and depth. CDS repeatedly applies a single feature-interaction block with parameters shared across iterations, so the number of iterations (the chain length) becomes a new scaling dimension that adds no parameters. A lightweight intra-chain residual connection stabilizes optimization and improves quality. CDS enables two regimes. In the \emph{compression regime}, shallow blocks with a longer chain match deeper baselines with fewer parameters and faster training; in the \emph{quality-scaling regime}, increasing chain length under a fixed parameter budget yields consistent offline and online gains, suggesting the chain dimension adds modeling capacity beyond parameter reuse. We evaluate CDS in a large-scale multi-task short-video ranking system in production. In the compression regime, CDS stays within $0.03\%$ of baseline offline quality while reducing trainable parameters by 26.6\% and improving training throughput by 6.4\%, with neutral-to-positive online participation. In the quality-scaling regime, quality improves monotonically with chain length. Wall-clock analysis shows the efficiency gain comes mainly not from reduced FLOPs but from lower cross-device synchronization overhead and reduced optimizer update cost. These results position parameter-shared iterative computation as a practical, communication-efficient scaling axis for industrial ranking systems.