Formulating information retrieval as a variant of generative modeling, specifically using autoregressive models to generate relevant identifiers for a given query, has recently attracted considerable attention. However, its application to personalized sticker retrieval remains largely unexplored and presents unique challenges: existing relevance-based generative retrieval methods typically lack personalization, leading to a mismatch between diverse user expectations and the retrieved results. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a novel generative framework for personalized sticker retrieval, and make two key contributions: (i) To encode user-specific sticker preferences, we design a representation learning model to learn discriminative user representations. It is trained on three prediction tasks that leverage personal information and click history; and (ii) To generate stickers aligned with a user's query intent, we propose a novel intent-aware learning objective that prioritizes stickers associated with higher-ranked intents. Empirical results from both offline evaluations and online tests demonstrate that PEARL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
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