Sachin Yadav

Jatin Prakash, Anirudh Buvanesh, Bishal Santra et al.

Extreme Classification (XC) aims to map a query to the most relevant documents from a very large document set. XC algorithms used in real-world applications learn this mapping from datasets curated from implicit feedback, such as user clicks. However, these datasets inevitably suffer from missing labels. In this work, we observe that systematic missing labels lead to missing knowledge, which is critical for accurately modelling relevance between queries and documents. We formally show that this absence of knowledge cannot be recovered using existing methods such as propensity weighting and data imputation strategies that solely rely on the training dataset. While LLMs provide an attractive solution to augment the missing knowledge, leveraging them in applications with low latency requirements and large document sets is challenging. To incorporate missing knowledge at scale, we propose SKIM (Scalable Knowledge Infusion for Missing Labels), an algorithm that leverages a combination of small LM and abundant unstructured meta-data to effectively mitigate the missing label problem. We show the efficacy of our method on large-scale public datasets through exhaustive unbiased evaluation ranging from human annotations to simulations inspired from industrial settings. SKIM outperforms existing methods on Recall@100 by more than 10 absolute points. Additionally, SKIM scales to proprietary query-ad retrieval datasets containing 10 million documents, outperforming contemporary methods by 12% in offline evaluation and increased ad click-yield by 1.23% in an online A/B test conducted on a popular search engine. We release our code, prompts, trained XC models and finetuned SLMs at: https://github.com/bicycleman15/skim

Sachin Yadav, Tejaswi Choppa, Dominik Schlechtweg

This paper explores using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to automate the data annotation process with automatic prompting techniques. The main aim of this paper is to reuse human annotation guidelines along with some annotated data to design automatic prompts for LLMs, focusing on the semantic proximity annotation task. Automatic prompts are compared to customized prompts. We further implement the prompting strategies into an open-source text annotation tool, enabling easy online use via the OpenAI API. Our study reveals the crucial role of accurate prompt design and suggests that prompting GPT-4 with human-like instructions is not straightforwardly possible for the semantic proximity task. We show that small modifications to the human guidelines already improve the performance, suggesting possible ways for future research.

Aadesh Desai, Eshan Gujarathi, Saagar Parikh et al.

Air pollution kills around 7 million people annually, and approximately 2.4 billion people are exposed to hazardous air pollution. Accurate, fine-grained air quality (AQ) monitoring is essential to control and reduce pollution. However, AQ station deployment is sparse, and thus air quality inference for unmonitored locations is crucial. Conventional interpolation methods fail to learn the complex AQ phenomena. This work demonstrates that Deep Gaussian Process models (DGPs) are a promising model for the task of AQ inference. We implement Doubly Stochastic Variational Inference, a DGP algorithm, and show that it performs comparably to the state-of-the-art models.

Alessandro Magnani, Feng Liu, Suthee Chaidaroon et al.

In product search, the retrieval of candidate products before re-ranking is more 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.

Sachin Yadav, Dominik Schlechtweg

We propose XL-DURel, a finetuned, multilingual Sentence Transformer model optimized for ordinal Word-in-Context classification. We test several loss functions for regression and ranking tasks managing to outperform previous models on ordinal and binary data with a ranking objective based on angular distance in complex space. We further show that binary WiC can be treated as a special case of ordinal WiC and that optimizing models for the general ordinal task improves performance on the more specific binary task. This paves the way for a unified treatment of WiC modeling across different task formulations.

Navid Mehrdad, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Mossaab Bagdouri et al.

High relevance of retrieved and re-ranked items to the search query is the cornerstone of successful product search, yet measuring relevance of items to queries is one of the most challenging tasks in product information retrieval, and quality of product search is highly influenced by the precision and scale of available relevance-labelled data. In this paper, we present an array of techniques for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for automating the relevance judgment of query-item pairs (QIPs) at scale. Using a unique dataset of multi-million QIPs, annotated by human evaluators, we test and optimize hyper parameters for finetuning billion-parameter LLMs with and without Low Rank Adaption (LoRA), as well as various modes of item attribute concatenation and prompting in LLM finetuning, and consider trade offs in item attribute inclusion for quality of relevance predictions. We demonstrate considerable improvement over baselines of prior generations of LLMs, as well as off-the-shelf models, towards relevance annotations on par with the human relevance evaluators. Our findings have immediate implications for the growing field of relevance judgment automation in product search.