arXiv:2610.36408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daily item co-occurrence embeddings are paired with next-day behavior without future-behavior leakage. Multi-day click-through rate (CTR) training therefore mixes versions whose directions and norms may differ for the same item. We compare Word2Vec and an item-graph XSimGCL adaptation across initialization, inheritance, post-processing, training constraints, and downstream augmentation. The inventory contains 48 configurations, including 32 common-protocol CTR evaluations. Observed metrics are reported as relative percentage changes from the corresponding Word2Vec baseline (0%), with raw values and exact dataset sizes withheld. Three findings emerge. First, multiple upstream interventions improve compatibility and CTR. ID-init and orthogonal alignment increase cosine by 51.2% and 93.4%, and GAUC by 2.2% and 2.6%, relative to ordinary Word2Vec. Retrieval and geometry remain insufficient downstream surrogates. Second, warm starts perform strongly but accumulate scale. The day-matched norm increase over Word2Vec reaches 102.5% after eight days; daily global rescaling limits it to 8.2% and attains the highest observed GAUC increase, 4.0%. Third, CTR learning through a dimensionality-reducing encoder further adapts to residual drift. Against dimension-matched random-projection, SVD, and untrained-network controls, trained encoders attain the highest cross-day cosine for four of six upstream methods. The other two rank third and second in train-to-test cosine. These industrial results support complementary roles for upstream stabilization, inherited-scale management, and downstream task learning.