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. 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.
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.
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: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.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.00638v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval is the first stage of modern search and advertising systems, selecting a candidate set from a large item universe for downstream ranking an...
The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."
arXiv:2606. 31693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The wave of AI-native applications is moving shopping beyond page- and feed-based browsing toward intent-driven experiences orchestrated by LLM agents.