Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a strong candidate generator for sequential recommendation as language models and semantic-item identifiers have improved. However, GR is not a uniformly stron...
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.
By Nikhil Kothari, Saksham Samdani, Ritam Mallick, Praveen Gupta, Ankit Vijay, Surender Kumar
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.
By Ji Xin, Xiao Xiao, Ishan Bhatt, Vinesh Gudla, Trace Levinson, Raochuan Fan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Prakash Putta, Tejaswi Tenneti
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:2603. 29247v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch.
By Zhiyuan Peng, Xuyang Wu, Huaixiao Tou, Yi Fang, Yu Gong
The paper examines LLM-based recommendation rerankers that are often evaluated under an oracle protocol, which guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set. Across Amazon datasets, this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92–95% because realistic retrieval only covers 2–19% of relevant items at K=100, creating a recall ceiling that limits any closed-candidate reranker's top‑k NDCG. The authors find that various optimisation strategies—including prompt engineering, model scaling, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine‑tuning, hybrid retrieval, score‑aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion—do not significantly improve over a collaborative‑filtering baseline under realistic retrieval, and they propose a Recall‑Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP) to better assess rerankers in low‑recall regimes.
By Zhaohui Wang
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.
By Evangelia Christakopoulou, Vivekkumar Patel, Hemanth Velaga, Sandip Gaikwad, Sean Suchter, Venkat Sundaranatha
The paper introduces a retrieval‑grounded credit‑assignment method for generative recommenders that use Semantic IDs (SIDs). By structuring each autoregressive trace into a history summary, a set of interest hypotheses, and a final SID, a frozen retriever verifies each hypothesis as a catalog query. Rewards are assigned at the hypothesis level when any query retrieves the target within the top‑K, allowing distinct updates for rollouts that share the same SID reward and improving SID recommendation performance on Amazon Reviews datasets.
arXiv:2606. 06779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In multi-vertical e-commerce platforms like DoorDash, relatively newer product verticals such as grocery and retail present a significant opportunity for personalization innovation.
By Nimesh Sinha, Raghav Saboo, Martin Wang, Sudeep Das
The paper proposes a retrieval‑grounded credit‑assignment method for generative recommenders that use Semantic IDs (SIDs). By structuring each generated trace into a history summary, a set of interest hypotheses, and a final SID, and then verifying each hypothesis with a frozen retriever, the method assigns reward at the hypothesis level rather than only at the final SID. Experiments on Amazon Reviews datasets show consistent improvements in SID recommendation, and an oracle analysis on Video Games data demonstrates that selecting target‑relevant queries among generated interests boosts recall and ranking.
By Mengdan Zhu, Yufan Zhao, Yao Zhao, Sophie Di, Tao Di, Yulan Yan, Sridhar Iyer, Liang Zhao
The paper investigates how scaling hard‑negative training for rerankers can improve industrial legal retrieval systems once embedding recall saturates. On Chinese legal benchmarks, a pipeline that first uses embedding‑mined negatives and then self‑mined negatives yields the best trade‑off, and a 4B‑parameter Stage2 reranker outperforms the native 4B model on STARD, CSAID, and internal datasets. The study demonstrates that evaluating retrieval and reranking stages separately is beneficial for optimizing industrial retrieval performance.
By Yunhan Li, Mingjie Xie, Zeyang Shi, Gengshen Wu, Min Yang
arXiv:2602.03608v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The way customers search for and choose products is changing with the rise of large language models (LLMs). LLM-based search, or generative engines...
By Haibo Jin, Huimin Zeng, Yifeng Luo, Haohan Wang