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: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).
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:2606. 04374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress of continuous embeddings for e-commerce search relevance, a long-standing open problem is the difficulty in capturing fine-grained attribute distinctions.
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.
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.
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.
Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.
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.
The paper introduces a scalable product‑linking system that uses a retrieve‑then‑match cascade. First, a lightweight text cross‑encoder auto‑resolves the majority of merchant‑catalog product pairs with high precision, while an agentic multimodal vision‑language model handles the remaining ambiguous cases by inspecting images and performing web searches. This approach balances computational cost and accuracy, improving overall link coverage from 68% to 77% without requiring fine‑tuning of the agent.
The paper introduces GradCIR, a method for training composed image retrieval (CIR) systems on graded relevance rather than binary relevance. It uses a vision‑language model to generate queries and 4‑level relevance labels, an iterative feedback loop to mine hard negatives, and a hierarchy‑aware angular objective to directly optimize graded labels. Experiments on a Walmart catalog and FashionIQ show significant NDCG improvements and the system is deployed in Walmart’s live visual‑search traffic.