Raymond Shiau

Yu Wang, Eric Tzeng, Raymond Shiau et al.

While recent image generation models demonstrate a remarkable ability to handle a wide variety of image generation tasks, this flexibility makes them hard to control via prompting or simple inference adaptation alone, rendering them unsuitable for use cases with strict product requirements. In this paper, we introduce Pinterest Canvas, our large-scale image generation system built to support image editing and enhancement use cases at Pinterest. Canvas is first trained on a diverse, multimodal dataset to produce a foundational diffusion model with broad image-editing capabilities. However, rather than relying on one generic model to handle every downstream task, we instead rapidly fine-tune variants of this base model on task-specific datasets, producing specialized models for individual use cases. We describe key components of Canvas and summarize our best practices for dataset curation, training, and inference. We also showcase task-specific variants through case studies on background enhancement and aspect-ratio outpainting, highlighting how we tackle their specific product requirements. Online A/B experiments demonstrate that our enhanced images receive a significant 18.0% and 12.5% engagement lift, respectively, and comparisons with human raters further validate that our models outperform third-party models on these tasks. Finally, we showcase other Canvas variants, including multi-image scene synthesis and image-to-video generation, demonstrating that our approach can generalize to a wide variety of potential downstream tasks.

Raymond Shiau, Hao-Yu Wu, Eric Kim et al.

As online content becomes ever more visual, the demand for searching by visual queries grows correspondingly stronger. Shop The Look is an online shopping discovery service at Pinterest, leveraging visual search to enable users to find and buy products within an image. In this work, we provide a holistic view of how we built Shop The Look, a shopping oriented visual search system, along with lessons learned from addressing shopping needs. We discuss topics including core technology across object detection and visual embeddings, serving infrastructure for realtime inference, and data labeling methodology for training/evaluation data collection and human evaluation. The user-facing impacts of our system design choices are measured through offline evaluations, human relevance judgements, and online A/B experiments. The collective improvements amount to cumulative relative gains of over 160% in end-to-end human relevance judgements and over 80% in engagement. Shop The Look is deployed in production at Pinterest.

David C. Liu, Stephanie Rogers, Raymond Shiau et al.

Related Pins is the Web-scale recommender system that powers over 40% of user engagement on Pinterest. This paper is a longitudinal study of three years of its development, exploring the evolution of the system and its components from prototypes to present state. Each component was originally built with many constraints on engineering effort and computational resources, so we prioritized the simplest and highest-leverage solutions. We show how organic growth led to a complex system and how we managed this complexity. Many challenges arose while building this system, such as avoiding feedback loops, evaluating performance, activating content, and eliminating legacy heuristics. Finally, we offer suggestions for tackling these challenges when engineering Web-scale recommender systems.