Yandex Introduces Sona: A Single Generative Recommender That Replaces Entire Recommendation Cascade
Most production recommenders are cascades. Candidate generators feed a pre-ranker, which feeds a heavy ranker built on hundreds of engineered features. Yandex’s Sona Technical Report describes a different design. Sona is a generative AI model that brings candidate generation and ranking into a single system, replacing the multiple stages typically used in recommendation pipelines. Yandex

