Dense Feature Representation over Sequence Modeling: A Solution to the KDD Cup 2026 UniRec Challenge

Abstract

We describe our 10th-place solution to the KDD Cup 2026 Tencent UniRec Challenge, industrial click-to-conversion (CVR) prediction over 34.82M records, and we ask which mechanisms actually move held-out AUC. Starting from the official PCVRHyFormer baseline, a 15-step single-variable chain raises test AUC from 0.813237 to 0.827816, and our final submission reaches 0.828535. A leave-one-out ablation from the full model attributes the gain: removing the dense-feature representation stack costs 0.0095 AUC and removing the orthogonalized optimizer costs 0.0028, while no sequence-modeling component (merged single-stream backbone, polarity channel, auxiliary head, per-token FFN) costs more than 0.0005, within or adjacent to a $\pm$0.0004 seed band. We also report a generalization hazard: the row-group train/validation split shares one time window, so validation AUC overstates the leaderboard by about 0.014; anti-memorization and high-cardinality-ID changes even invert sign against it, a divergence that traces to dump-to-dump distribution shift and survives a time-ordered re-split. Dense representation and optimization, not finer sequence modeling, drive CVR AUC at this scale, and verdicts must come from the held-out leaderboard.