SynthAVE: Scalable Synthetic Labeling for E-Commerce with LLM-Arena Validation
Authors: Andrea Scarinci, Virginia Negri, Brayan Impata, Suleiman Khan, Victor Martinez, Marcello Federico
Organizations: Amazon
Abstract
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for e-commerce attribute extraction requires labeled data representative across thousands of product types, attributes, and multiple languages. This combinatorial scale translates to millions of annotations, rendering human labeling prohibitively costly. While recent work has demonstrated synthetic label generation using LLMs, deploying such approaches at industrial scale requires integrated quality control mechanisms. We present SynthAVE, a large-scale benchmark for attribute-value verification spanning 12,726 products across 229 product types, 792 attributes, and 4 languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German). To validate synthetic labels at scale, we introduce a multi-LLM arena framework where each sample is evaluated by 21 judge configurations (7 model families × 3 prompts), with final labels determined via majority voting; disagreements with the synthetic label are expert-adjudicated and agreement cases are audited on a stratified sample. The majority vote ensemble agrees with expert labels at Cohen's κ=0.92 (95.0% agreement), while individual judges agree with one another only moderately (Fleiss' κ=0.76)--by design, since we select for diversity. This demonstrates that diverse models with varying individual judgments aggregate into highly reliable predictions, enabling cost-effective validation at scale while concentrating expert effort on the cases where it changes the label. We estimate the resulting label quality at 97.9%.
Customers rely on specific product attributes to compare products and make purchasing decisions, but e-commerce catalogs are messy and unstructured, making it difficult to identify which attributes matter most and extract them at scale. Standard Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) systems treat all attributes equally, producing large, inconsistent attribute sets that do not reflect the factors consumers use to differentiate products. We introduce a two-stage LLM pipeline that first discovers a compact, ranked schema of purchase-discriminative attributes for each product category, then extracts their values from catalog text using a fine-tuned compact LLM (Qwen3-4B) with Hyper-Parallel Decoding (HPD). This pipeline achieves 85% extraction accuracy, on par with the foundational LLM it was distilled from, while reducing inference costs by 92% over foundational LLMs, enabling production-scale use for product discovery and catalog enrichment. The resulting category-level structured representations effectively constitute automatically constructed product knowledge bases, providing consistent, comparable attributes across varied product categories that can ground downstream knowledge-intensive applications.
The increasing reliance on Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse sectors highlights the need for robust domain-specific and language-specific evaluation datasets; however, the collection of such datasets is challenging due to privacy concerns, regulatory restrictions, and the time cost for manual creation. Existing automated benchmarking methods are often limited by relying on pre-existing data, poor scalability, single-domain focus, and lack of multilingual support. We present STELLAR-E - a fully automated system to generate high-quality synthetic datasets of custom size, using minimal human inputs without depending on existing datasets. The system is structured in two stages: (1) We modify the TGRT Self-Instruct framework to create a synthetic data engine that enables controllable, custom synthetic dataset generation, and (2) an evaluation pipeline incorporating statistical and LLM-based metrics to assess the applicability of the synthetic dataset for LLM-based application evaluations. The synthetic datasets reach an average difference of +5.7% in terms of LLM-as-a-judge scores against existing language-specific benchmarks, demonstrating comparable quality for comprehensive assessment of big and small LLMs. While real datasets remain slightly more challenging for LLMs especially for smaller models, this work establishes a scalable and domain-adaptable benchmarking framework that supports fair evaluation of LLM applications, offering a faster alternative to manual approaches and enabling high-efficiency automated quality assurance cycles.
E-commerce platforms in emerging markets often operate with underdeveloped product catalogs that contain only category taxonomies but lack structured attribute schemas. This absence of fine-grained product attributes limits search capabilities -- preventing faceted filtering, degrading query understanding, and weakening semantic representations used by search systems. We present BEATS, a human-in-the-loop LLM framework for bootstrapping product attribute taxonomies entirely from scratch. Our approach extends a multi-stage LLM generation pipeline with two critical production stages: (1) proactive quality checking by model developers to filter erroneous outputs, and (2) human annotation by domain-expert local staff to validate generated attributes. The framework operates iteratively -- prompts at each generation stage are refined based on quality check observations and annotator feedback across successive rounds, progressively improving attribute quality. Once the attribute taxonomy is established, we employ LLMs to perform structured attribute tagging on individual product items, enriching their contextual representations. The enriched catalog directly benefits multiple components of the search system: enabling granular attribute-based filtering, providing structured features for ranking models, and improving semantic representations for dense retrieval. We validate the generated taxonomy by training dense retrieval models on attribute-enriched product data, demonstrating consistent improvements over baselines using original catalog information. Our system has been deployed at Rakuten Taiwan, enriching 9 major categories spanning 2,694 sub-categories with 67,277 generated attributes, and over 5.4 million products have been tagged with the generated attributes, with plans to enrich the entire product catalog.