Embedding-based retrieval (EBR) is foundational to large-scale e-commerce search, yet its effectiveness is often constrained by the quality of training signals and the representational capacity of the encoder. Standard dual-encoders suffer from a training-inference gap: they are optimized on narrow candidate pools but must discriminate against hundreds of millions of items during inference. Furthermore, while transitioning to higher-capacity backbones can mitigate this gap, simply replacing a mature model can lead to inconsistent retrieval behavior and a loss of the domain-specific knowledge established in previous iterations. In this paper, we present a unified pipeline deployed at Walmart that addresses both signal quality and model evolution. Our contributions are two-fold: (1) Hybrid Hard Negative Mining: We integrate Online Cross-Batch Sampling to increase negative diversity by an order of magnitude and Hybrid Offline Mining, which combines cross-encoder predictions with metadata heuristics to identify nuanced mismatches. (2) Legacy-Aware Distillation: We transition from DistilBERT to a higher-capacity GTE-base encoder. To ensure a smooth and superior transition, we introduce a Warm-Start Distillation technique that transfers domain-specific expertise from the legacy model to the new backbone. Validated through extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing, the proposed pipeline is deployed in live production, delivering a +7.34% improvement in NDCG@5 and a +0.50% lift in gross revenue.

Embedding-based neural retrieval (EBR) is an effective search retrieval method in product search for tackling the vocabulary gap between customer search queries and products. The initial launch of our EBR system at Walmart yielded significant gains in relevance and add-to-cart rates [1]. However, despite EBR generally retrieving more relevant products for reranking, we have observed numerous instances of relevance degradation. Enhancing retrieval performance is crucial, as it directly influences product reranking and affects the customer shopping experience. Factors contributing to these degradations include false positives/negatives in the training data and the inability to handle query misspellings. To address these issues, we present several approaches to further strengthen the capabilities of our EBR model in terms of retrieval relevance. We introduce a Relevance Reward Model (RRM) based on human relevance feedback. We utilize RRM to remove noise from the training data and distill it into our EBR model through a multi-objective loss. In addition, we present the techniques to increase the performance of our EBR model, such as typo-aware training, and semi-positive generation. The effectiveness of our EBR is demonstrated through offline relevance evaluation, online AB tests, and successful deployments to live production.

In embedding-based retrieval, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search enables efficient retrieval of similar items from large-scale datasets. While maximizing recall of relevant items is usually the goal of retrieval systems, a low precision may lead to a poor search experience. Unlike lexical retrieval, which inherently limits the size of the retrieved set through keyword matching, dense retrieval via ANN search has no natural cutoff. Moreover, the cosine similarity scores of embedding vectors are often optimized via contrastive or ranking losses, which make them difficult to interpret. Consequently, relying on top-K or cosine-similarity cutoff is often insufficient to filter out irrelevant results effectively. This issue is prominent in product search, where the number of relevant products is often small. This paper introduces a novel relevance filtering component (called "Cosine Adapter") for embedding-based retrieval to address this challenge. Our approach maps raw cosine similarity scores to interpretable scores using a query-dependent mapping function. We then apply a global threshold on the mapped scores to filter out irrelevant results. We are able to significantly increase the precision of the retrieved set, at the expense of a small loss of recall. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through experiments on both public MS MARCO dataset and internal Walmart product search data. Furthermore, online A/B testing on the Walmart site validates the practical value of our approach in real-world e-commerce settings.

In product search, the retrieval of candidate products before re-ranking is more mission critical and challenging than other search like web search, especially for tail queries, which have a complex and specific search intent. In this paper, we present a hybrid system for e-commerce search deployed at Walmart that combines traditional inverted index and embedding-based neural retrieval to better answer user tail queries. Our system significantly improved the relevance of the search engine, measured by both offline and online evaluations. The improvements were achieved through a combination of different approaches. We present a new technique to train the neural model at scale. and describe how the system was deployed in production with little impact on response time. We highlight multiple learnings and practical tricks that were used in the deployment of this system.