CVJan 16
From Pixels to Purchase: Building and Evaluating a Taxonomy-Decoupled Visual Search Engine for Home Goods E-commerceCheng Lyu, Jingyue Zhang, Ryan Maunu et al.
Visual search is critical for e-commerce, especially in style-driven domains where user intent is subjective and open-ended. Existing industrial systems typically couple object detection with taxonomy-based classification and rely on catalog data for evaluation, which is prone to noise that limits robustness and scalability. We propose a taxonomy-decoupled architecture that uses classification-free region proposals and unified embeddings for similarity retrieval, enabling a more flexible and generalizable visual search. To overcome the evaluation bottleneck, we propose an LLM-as-a-Judge framework that assesses nuanced visual similarity and category relevance for query-result pairs in a zero-shot manner, removing dependence on human annotations or noise-prone catalog data. Deployed at scale on a global home goods platform, our system improves retrieval quality and yields a measurable uplift in customer engagement, while our offline evaluation metrics strongly correlate with real-world outcomes.
CLSep 30, 2025
End-to-End Aspect-Guided Review Summarization at ScaleIlya Boytsov, Vinny DeGenova, Mikhail Balyasin et al.
We present a scalable large language model (LLM)-based system that combines aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) with guided summarization to generate concise and interpretable product review summaries for the Wayfair platform. Our approach first extracts and consolidates aspect-sentiment pairs from individual reviews, selects the most frequent aspects for each product, and samples representative reviews accordingly. These are used to construct structured prompts that guide the LLM to produce summaries grounded in actual customer feedback. We demonstrate the real-world effectiveness of our system through a large-scale online A/B test. Furthermore, we describe our real-time deployment strategy and release a dataset of 11.8 million anonymized customer reviews covering 92,000 products, including extracted aspects and generated summaries, to support future research in aspect-guided review summarization.