The paper describes a hybrid search system developed at Target that combines lexical and vector search to improve retail product search. It details data processing, embedding training, precision control, multi‑channel result fusion—specifically weighted interleaving—and performance optimizations for low latency. The system achieved measurable gains in click‑through rate, order conversion, and demand per visitor while reducing zero‑result searches.
arXiv:2607. 23121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) require retrieving relevant items from multi-million product catalogs, balancing two competing objectives: retargeting (re-surfacing known interests) and prospecting (discovering new categories).
arXiv:2607. 03886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sponsored search plays a crucial role as a revenue stream for search engines, wherein advertisers competitively bid on keywords that align with the users' search queries.
The paper proposes a single hierarchical Semantic ID (SID) system to unify product identification across multiple merchants in e-commerce. By learning SID representations from product content, the authors demonstrate that ranking algorithms can aggregate consumer affinity and product performance over SID prefixes, improving offline relevance and online engagement. For query reformulation, SID concepts guide navigation and refinement, yielding better intent preservation and higher-quality suggestions compared to taxonomy or raw query transitions.
arXiv:2607. 27172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall.
Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall. In e-commerce marketplaces and particularly grocery, this paradigm is limiting, as user satisfaction and commercial outcomes depend heavily on the discoverability of substitute, complementary, and thematically related items.
arXiv:2607. 17499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions.
arXiv:2607. 03880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sponsored search plays a crucial role in e-commerce revenue generation, where advertisers strategically bid on keywords to capture the attention of users through relevant search queries.
arXiv:2606. 01504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic retrieval in e-commerce must handle short, noisy, and colloquial queries over large product catalogs with fine-grained attribute distinctions.
arXiv:2602. 23234v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale commercial search systems optimize for relevance to drive successful sessions that help users find what they are looking for.
RPTune is an end‑to‑end framework that improves in‑context catalog search for small merchant businesses by learning to curate product catalogs and fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) with catalog‑grounded supervision. It uses an encoder‑reorganizer curator to order and prune products based on LLM feedback, and then applies context‑relative rewards during LLM post‑training. Across seven real merchants and 100 complex conversational queries per merchant, RPTune boosts search accuracy by up to 31.4 percentage points from curation alone and an additional 10.3 points on average from post‑training.
The paper introduces Mine and Refine, a two‑stage contrastive training framework designed to improve embedding‑based retrieval for large‑scale e‑commerce search. It tackles graded relevance, hard‑sample mining, and unstable similarity separability by using a lightweight LLM as a scalable labeler and a multi‑level circle loss to enforce margin‑controlled separation across relevance levels. The method has been deployed in production across multiple product verticals, yielding statistically significant increases in user engagement, gross order value, and retrieval relevance metrics.
arXiv:2609.23646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: E-commerce search requires distinguishing products that are merely related to a query from those that directly satisfy the user's shopping intent. We...