Product retrieval is the backbone of e-commerce search: for each user query, it identifies a high-recall candidate set from billions of items, laying the foundation for high-quality ranking and user experience. Despite extensive optimization for mainstream queries, existing systems still struggle with long-tail queries, especially knowledge-intensive ones. These queries exhibit diverse linguistic patterns, often lack explicit purchase intent, and require domain-specific knowledge reasoning for accurate interpretation. They also suffer from a shortage of reliable behavioral logs, which makes such queries a persistent challenge for retrieval optimization.

In the realm of e-commerce search, semantic matching has consistently been a core issue, as it directly affects user experience and company revenue. However, users' queries often fail to effectively retrieve relevant products due to discrepancies between the user's expression habits and product names written by merchants. Even existing large language model (LLM) based query rewriting methods can bridge the semantic gap for most queries, they are still ineffective for long-tail queries with complicated semantic. In this paper, we propose Complicated Semantic Alignment Query Rewrite(CSA-QR) framework, which mitigates the semantic differences in long-tail queries with complicated semantics. CSA-QR comprises three stages: high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset generation, multi-dimensional alignment dataset generation, and binary feedback Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for reinforcement alignment. Initially, we utilize general large language models to generate rewrite candidates, followed by manual annotation to discriminate the candidates, then use the retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) based on existing annotations to produce a higher quality SFT dataset. Subsequently, we decouple the feedback data into user semantic consistency and merchant expression consistency dimensions to collect multi-dimensional alignment data. Finally, we introduce a binary feedback method to train the reward model, enabling it to better guide alignment training within our context. We also identify a set of more appropriate reward model evaluation metrics to guide our iterations. Offline experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in improving retrieval performance. Online A/B tests reveal that our method significantly boosts critical metrics such as product click-through rate (CTR), gross merchandise volume (GMV) and number of transaction (#Trans) for long-tail complicated queries. CSA-QR has been deployed on Taobao, one of China's most popular online shopping platforms, since September 2024.

Product search is an important service on Taobao, the largest e-commerce platform in China. Through this service, users can easily find products relevant to their specific needs. Coping with billion-size query loads, Taobao product search has traditionally relied on classical term-based retrieval models due to their powerful and interpretable indexes. In essence, efficient retrieval hinges on the proper storage of the inverted index. Recent successes involve reducing the size (pruning) of the inverted index but the construction and deployment of lossless static index pruning in practical product search still pose non-trivial challenges.

E-commerce search engines comprise a retrieval phase and a ranking phase, where the first one returns a candidate product set given user queries. Recently, vision-language pre-training, combining textual information with visual clues, has been popular in the application of retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel V+L pre-training method to solve the retrieval problem in Taobao Search. We design a visual pre-training task based on contrastive learning, outperforming common regression-based visual pre-training tasks. In addition, we adopt two negative sampling schemes, tailored for the large-scale retrieval task. Besides, we introduce the details of the online deployment of our proposed method in real-world situations. Extensive offline/online experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method on the retrieval task. Our proposed method is employed as one retrieval channel of Taobao Search and serves hundreds of millions of users in real time.

In e-commerce search engines, query rewriting (QR) is a crucial technique that improves shopping experience by reducing the vocabulary gap between user queries and product catalog. Recent works have mainly adopted the generative paradigm. However, they hardly ensure high-quality generated rewrites and do not consider personalization, which leads to degraded search relevance. In this work, we present Contrastive Learning Enhanced Query Rewriting (CLE-QR), the solution used in Taobao product search. It uses a novel contrastive learning enhanced architecture based on "query retrieval-semantic relevance ranking-online ranking". It finds the rewrites from hundreds of millions of historical queries while considering relevance and personalization. Specifically, we first alleviate the representation degeneration problem during the query retrieval stage by using an unsupervised contrastive loss, and then further propose an interaction-aware matching method to find the beneficial and incremental candidates, thus improving the quality and relevance of candidate queries. We then present a relevance-oriented contrastive pre-training paradigm on the noisy user feedback data to improve semantic ranking performance. Finally, we rank these candidates online with the user profile to model personalization for the retrieval of more relevant products. We evaluate CLE-QR on Taobao Product Search, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China. Significant metrics gains are observed in online A/B tests. CLE-QR has been deployed to our large-scale commercial retrieval system and serviced hundreds of millions of users since December 2021. We also introduce its online deployment scheme, and share practical lessons and optimization tricks of our lexical match system.

Waterfall Recommender System (RS), a popular form of RS in mobile applications, is a stream of recommended items consisting of successive pages that can be browsed by scrolling. In waterfall RS, when a user finishes browsing a page, the edge (e.g., mobile phones) would send a request to the cloud server to get a new page of recommendations, known as the paging request mechanism. RSs typically put a large number of items into one page to reduce excessive resource consumption from numerous paging requests, which, however, would diminish the RSs' ability to timely renew the recommendations according to users' real-time interest and lead to a poor user experience. Intuitively, inserting additional requests inside pages to update the recommendations with a higher frequency can alleviate the problem. However, previous attempts, including only non-adaptive strategies (e.g., insert requests uniformly), would eventually lead to resource overconsumption. To this end, we envision a new learning task of edge intelligence named Intelligent Request Strategy Design (IRSD). It aims to improve the effectiveness of waterfall RSs by determining the appropriate occasions of request insertion based on users' real-time intention. Moreover, we propose a new paradigm of adaptive request insertion strategy named Uplift-based On-edge Smart Request Framework (AdaRequest). AdaRequest 1) captures the dynamic change of users' intentions by matching their real-time behaviors with their historical interests based on attention-based neural networks. 2) estimates the counterfactual uplift of user purchase brought by an inserted request based on causal inference. 3) determines the final request insertion strategy by maximizing the utility function under online resource constraints. We conduct extensive experiments on both offline dataset and online A/B test to verify the effectiveness of AdaRequest. Remarkably, AdaRequest has been deployed on the Waterfall RS of Taobao and brought over 3% lift on Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).

Recommender Systems (RS), as an efficient tool to discover users' interested items from a very large corpus, has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry. As the initial stage of RS, large-scale matching is fundamental yet challenging. A typical recipe is to learn user and item representations with a two-tower architecture and then calculate the similarity score between both representation vectors, which however still struggles in how to properly deal with negative samples. In this paper, we find that the common practice that randomly sampling negative samples from the entire space and treating them equally is not an optimal choice, since the negative samples from different sub-spaces at different stages have different importance to a matching model. To address this issue, we propose a novel method named Unbiased Model-Agnostic Matching Approach (UMA2). It consists of two basic modules including 1) General Matching Model (GMM), which is model-agnostic and can be implemented as any embedding-based two-tower models; and 2) Negative Samples Debias Network (NSDN), which discriminates negative samples by borrowing the idea of Inverse Propensity Weighting (IPW) and re-weighs the loss in GMM. UMA$^2$ seamlessly integrates these two modules in an end-to-end multi-task learning framework. Extensive experiments on both real-world offline dataset and online A/B test demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

A good personalized product search (PPS) system should not only focus on retrieving relevant products, but also consider user personalized preference. Recent work on PPS mainly adopts the representation learning paradigm, e.g., learning representations for each entity (including user, product and query) from historical user behaviors (aka. user-product-query interactions). However, we argue that existing methods do not sufficiently exploit the crucial collaborative signal, which is latent in historical interactions to reveal the affinity between the entities. Collaborative signal is quite helpful for generating high-quality representation, exploiting which would benefit the representation learning of one node from its connected nodes.

User preference modeling is a vital yet challenging problem in personalized product search. In recent years, latent space based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance by jointly learning semantic representations of products, users, and text tokens. However, existing methods are limited in their ability to model user preferences. They typically represent users by the products they visited in a short span of time using attentive models and lack the ability to exploit relational information such as user-product interactions or item co-occurrence relations. In this work, we propose to address the limitations of prior arts by exploring local and global user behavior patterns on a user successive behavior graph, which is constructed by utilizing short-term actions of all users. To capture implicit user preference signals and collaborative patterns, we use an efficient jumping graph convolution to explore high-order relations to enrich product representations for user preference modeling. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated with existing latent space based methods and be potentially applied in any product retrieval method that uses purchase history to model user preferences. Extensive experiments on eight Amazon benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/floatSDSDS/SBG .

In many classical e-commerce platforms, personalized recommendation has been proven to be of great business value, which can improve user satisfaction and increase the revenue of platforms. In this paper, we present a new recommendation problem, Trigger-Induced Recommendation (TIR), where users’ instant interest can be explicitly induced with a trigger item and follow-up related target items are recommended accordingly. TIR has become ubiquitous and popular in e-commerce platforms. In this paper, we figure out that although existing recommendation models are effective in traditional recommendation scenarios by mining users’ interests based on their massive historical behaviors, they are struggling in discovering users’ instant interests in the TIR scenario due to the discrepancy between these scenarios, resulting in inferior performance. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel recommendation method named Deep Interest Highlight Network (DIHN) for Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction in TIR scenarios. It has three main components including 1) User Intent Network (UIN), which responds to generate a precise probability score to predict user’s intent on the trigger item; 2) Fusion Embedding Module (FEM), which adaptively fuses trigger item and target item embeddings based on the prediction from UIN; and (3) Hybrid Interest Extracting Module (HIEM), which can effectively highlight users’ instant interest from their behaviors based on the result of FEM. Extensive offline and online evaluations on a real-world e-commerce platform demonstrate the superiority of DIHN over state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available 1.

Nowadays, the product search service of e-commerce platforms has become a vital shopping channel in people's life. The retrieval phase of products determines the search system's quality and gradually attracts researchers' attention. Retrieving the most relevant products from a large-scale corpus while preserving personalized user characteristics remains an open question. Recent approaches in this domain have mainly focused on embedding-based retrieval (EBR) systems. However, after a long period of practice on Taobao, we find that the performance of the EBR system is dramatically degraded due to its: (1) low relevance with a given query and (2) discrepancy between the training and inference phases. Therefore, we propose a novel and practical embedding-based product retrieval model, named Multi-Grained Deep Semantic Product Retrieval (MGDSPR). Specifically, we first identify the inconsistency between the training and inference stages, and then use the softmax cross-entropy loss as the training objective, which achieves better performance and faster convergence. Two efficient methods are further proposed to improve retrieval relevance, including smoothing noisy training data and generating relevance-improving hard negative samples without requiring extra knowledge and training procedures. We evaluate MGDSPR on Taobao Product Search with significant metrics gains observed in offline experiments and online A/B tests. MGDSPR has been successfully deployed to the existing multi-channel retrieval system in Taobao Search. We also introduce the online deployment scheme and share practical lessons of our retrieval system to contribute to the community.

Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction in modern industrial e-commerce platforms is becoming increasingly important, which directly contributes to the final revenue. In order to address the well-known sample selection bias (SSB) and data sparsity (DS) issues encountered during CVR modeling, the abundant labeled macro behaviors (i.e., user's interactions with items) are used. Nonetheless, we observe that several purchase-related micro behaviors (i.e., user's interactions with specific components on the item detail page) can supplement fine-grained cues for CVR prediction. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel CVR prediction method by Hierarchically Modeling both Micro and Macro behaviors (HM3). Specifically, we first construct a complete user sequential behavior graph to hierarchically represent micro behaviors and macro behaviors as one-hop and two-hop post-click nodes. Then, we embody HM3 as a multi-head deep neural network, which predicts six probability variables corresponding to explicit sub-paths in the graph. They are further combined into the prediction targets of four auxiliary tasks as well as the final CVR according to the conditional probability rule defined on the graph. By employing multi-task learning and leveraging the abundant supervisory labels from micro and macro behaviors, HM3 can be trained end-to-end and address the SSB and DS issues. Extensive experiments on both offline and online settings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HM3 over representative state-of-the-art methods.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task for many industrial systems, such as display advertising and recommender systems. Recently, modeling user behavior sequences attracts much attention and shows great improvements in the CTR field. Existing works mainly exploit attention mechanism based on embedding product when considering relations between user behaviors and target item. However, this methodology lacks of concrete semantics and overlooks the underlying reasons driving a user to click on a target item. In this paper, we propose a new framework named Multiplex Target-Behavior Relation enhanced Network (MTBRN) to leverage multiplex relations between user behaviors and target item to enhance CTR prediction. Multiplex relations consist of meaningful semantics, which can bring a better understanding on users' interests from different perspectives. To explore and model multiplex relations, we propose to incorporate various graphs (e.g., knowledge graph and item-item similarity graph) to construct multiple relational paths between user behaviors and target item. Then Bi-LSTM is applied to encode each path in the path extractor layer. A path fusion network and a path activation network are devised to adaptively aggregate and finally learn the representation of all paths for CTR prediction. Extensive offline and online experiments clearly verify the effectiveness of our framework.

Recommender system (RS) devotes to predicting user preference to a given item and has been widely deployed in most web-scale applications. Recently, knowledge graph (KG) attracts much attention in RS due to its abundant connective information. Existing methods either explore independent meta-paths for user-item pairs over KG, or employ graph neural network (GNN) on whole KG to produce representations for users and items separately. Despite effectiveness, the former type of methods fails to fully capture structural information implied in KG, while the latter ignores the mutual effect between target user and item during the embedding propagation. In this work, we propose a new framework named Adaptive Target-Behavior Relational Graph network (ATBRG for short) to effectively capture structural relations of target user-item pairs over KG. Specifically, to associate the given target item with user behaviors over KG, we propose the graph connect and graph prune techniques to construct adaptive target-behavior relational graph. To fully distill structural information from the sub-graph connected by rich relations in an end-to-end fashion, we elaborate on the model design of ATBRG, equipped with relation-aware extractor layer and representation activation layer. We perform extensive experiments on both industrial and benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that ATBRG consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, ATBRG has also achieved a performance improvement of 5.1% on CTR metric after successful deployment in one popular recommendation scenario of Taobao APP.

Recommender system, as an essential part of modern e-commerce, consists of two fundamental modules, namely Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction. While CVR has a direct impact on the purchasing volume, its prediction is well-known challenging due to the Sample Selection Bias (SSB) and Data Sparsity (DS) issues. Although existing methods, typically built on the user sequential behavior path "impression->click->purchase", is effective for dealing with SSB issue, they still struggle to address the DS issue due to rare purchase training samples. Observing that users always take several purchase-related actions after clicking, we propose a novel idea of post-click behavior decomposition. Specifically, disjoint purchase-related Deterministic Action (DAction) and Other Action (OAction) are inserted between click and purchase in parallel, forming a novel user sequential behavior graph "impression->click->D(O)Action->purchase". Defining model on this graph enables to leverage all the impression samples over the entire space and extra abundant supervised signals from D(O)Action, which will effectively address the SSB and DS issues together. To this end, we devise a novel deep recommendation model named Elaborated Entire Space Supervised Multi-task Model (ESM2). According to the conditional probability rule defined on the graph, it employs multi-task learning to predict some decomposed sub-targets in parallel and compose them sequentially to formulate the final CVR. Extensive experiments on both offline and online environments demonstrate the superiority of ESM2 over state-of-the-art models. The source code and dataset will be released.

Capturing users' precise preferences is a fundamental problem in large-scale recommender system. Currently, item-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are common matching approaches in industry. However, they are not effective to model dynamic and evolving preferences of users. In this paper, we propose a new sequential deep matching (SDM) model to capture users' dynamic preferences by combining short-term sessions and long-term behaviors. Compared with existing sequence-aware recommendation methods, we tackle the following two inherent problems in real-world applications: (1) there could exist multiple interest tendencies in one session. (2) long-term preferences may not be effectively fused with current session interests. Long-term behaviors are various and complex, hence those highly related to the short-term session should be kept for fusion. We propose to encode behavior sequences with two corresponding components: multi-head self-attention module to capture multiple types of interests and long-short term gated fusion module to incorporate long-term preferences. Successive items are recommended after matching between sequential user behavior vector and item embedding vectors. Offline experiments on real-world datasets show the superior performance of the proposed SDM. Moreover, SDM has been successfully deployed on online large-scale recommender system at Taobao and achieves improvements in terms of a range of commercial metrics.