Dynamic Product Advertising (DPA) retrieval systems are a core component of modern e-commerce advertising; however, their evaluation remains challenging. Conventional offline engagement metrics are limited by sparse, biased feedback, while online evaluation is costly and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a user--product relevance metric for offline evaluation of DPA retrieval systems. The metric first compresses the engagement history into a compact set of intent representatives via Semantic-ID-grouped, event-stratified segmentation, then assesses the relevance of a recommended product to each individual intent and aggregates them as a user-level relevance score, yielding a stable and interpretable measure of retrieval quality. To compute this metric at scale, we leverage large language models (LLMs) as semantic relevance judges, capturing nuanced functional and semantic relationships that heuristic methods often miss. We propose an agentic, human-aligned prompting framework that generates multi-category relevance guidelines and distills teacher-model judgments into an efficient student model for scalable evaluation. The resulting metric strongly correlates with offline and online business metrics, enabling faster and more reliable DPA retrieval iteration before A/B testing.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. LLM-based User-Product Relevance Evaluation framework. (1) User Intent Representation : a multimodal encoder plus residual vector quantization assigns each engaged product a hierarchical semantic ID (SID); events sharing (SID,e) collapse into a single weighted intent representative, yielding the compact intent set dr . (2) Intent-Product Relevance Judge : an agentic guideline aligned with human reviewers anchors a teacher, PEFT-distilled into a student model. (3) Metric Computation : MicroRel/MacroRel under threshold- k aggregation, validated against offline retrieval-source rankings and online CTR/CVR. Diagram illustrating the stages of the LLM-based offline evaluation pipeline, including multi-agent guideline generation and student model distillation.
Src
CP
CR
NDCG@15
MAP@15
MicroRel
MacroRel
ImpRel
MF
+3.13 (1)
+0.91 (1)
+0.50 (1)
+0.29 (1)
+1.21 (1)
+1.02 (1)
+0.60 (1)
SU
+2.04 (2)
+0.37 (2)
+0.16 (4)
+0.19 (2)
+0.75 (2)
+0.30 (2)
+0.39 (2)
PBR
+0.45 (3)
+0.59 (3)
-0.03 (6)
+0.03 (4)
+0.12 (5)
-0.08 (6)
+0.18 (4)
CBR
+0.15 (4)
+0.30 (4)
+0.35 (2)
+0.11 (3)
+0.32 (3)
+0.07 (3)
+0.23 (3)
EBR
+0.15 (5)
+0.29 (5)
+0.28 (3)
+0.01 (5)
+0.24 (4)
+0.05 (4)
+0.12 (5)
Rand
0.00 (6)
0.00 (6)
0.00 (5)
0.00 (6)
0.00 (6)
0.00 (5)
0.00 (6)
Table 1. Retrieval source performance, reported as log-rel against the Random Baseline, i.e., log10(method/Rand) measures relative improvement (higher is better). And () indicates the ranking across all retrieval sources.
Retrieval Source
Offline LLM Judge
Online A/B Metrics
MicroRel
MacroRel
CTR
CVR
Content-based Retrieval Model 1
+0.138
+0.122
+0.149%
+1.472%
Content-based Retrieval Model 2
+0.176
+0.169
+0.211%
+4.98%
Engagement-based Retrieval Model 1
+0.068
+0.019
+0.350%
+2.604%
Engagement-based Retrieval Model 2
+0.062
+0.095
+0.210%
+2.194%
Table 2. Offline vs. online metrics for two retrieval families (content-based, engagement-based) across four online experiments (two for each family). log-rel reports each version against its controls, so positive values across both rows reflect successive improvements. All four online CTR/CVR deltas are statistically significant under our internal A/B framework within 14 days of windows with 10% of DPA traffics.
Intent-set Variant
Cost
Spear. vs. Full
P(CVR)
P(CR)
P(CP)
Full sequence (baseline)
100%
1.000
0.24
0.19
0.32
Random subsample ( 25% L_seq)
25%
0.905
0.26
0.23
0.19
Last 1-day window
11%
0.528
0.21
0.25
0.31
SID only, no event split
3.4%
0.990
0.30
0.17
0.24
SID + event split, uniform
3.4%
0.991
0.29
0.18
0.26
SID + event split, weighted
3.4%
0.989
0.50
0.29
0.35
Table 3. Intent-set construction ablation at k=7 . Column definitions: see § 4.1 .
Role
Model Config
Precision
Recall
F1
Teacher
Gemini-2.5-Pro (no guidel.)
0.824
0.825
0.816
Gemini-2.5-Pro (with guidel.)
0.861
0.866
0.860
Student
SigLIP-2-mm ( Tschannen et al., 2025 )
0.780
0.751
0.746
Gemini-2.5-Flash (with guidel.)
0.840
0.843
0.832
Gemini-2.5-Flash-ft
0.869
0.873
0.869
Gemini-2.5-Flash-lite-ft
0.845
0.849
0.846
Table 4. Impact of Guidelines and Student Models
Figure 2. MicroRel’s Pearson correlation with live CP, CR, and CVR as a function of the intent-aggregation threshold k . Stars mark per-metric peaks; all three peaks fall in k∈[5,7] . At the k=7 default, every CI is strictly positive.
Judge
p50 (ms)
p95 (ms)
QPS
Gemini-2.5-Pro (teacher, with guidel.)
6,963
10,840
2
Gemini-2.5-Flash (prompt, with guidel.)
2,189
8,807
4
Gemini-2.5-Flash-ft (ours)
751
1,117
18
Gemini-2.5-Flash-Lite-ft
647
1,342
20
Table 5. System efficiency of teacher and student judges. Latency is per-pair; QPS is aggregate throughput at the listed concurrency.
Online advertising studies how digital ads are targeted, ranked, priced, measured, and delivered while balancing budgets, business goals, and user interests.