Overview

E-commerce search connects shopper queries and preferences to product catalogs, aiming to improve discovery, relevance, and purchasing while serving marketplace goals. Systems combine lexical and vector retrieval, dense dual encoders, semantic product IDs and generative retrieval, then rerank results using behavioral, product-attribute, and multimodal signals. Language models also support query and intent understanding, conversational preference elicitation, and agentic shopping, with performance tested on relevance benchmarks and online measures such as clicks, conversion, and sales. A central challenge is balancing relevance and long-term user value with business objectives, while meeting precision, latency, cost, privacy, and safety constraints in production.

Latest papers

CardsList

42 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. A Smart Instant Book Filter Model based on Dual-Objective Optimization

    Oct 26, 2026Yi Hou, Li Fan, Huizhong DuanE-Commerce SearchRecommender Systems

  2. Useful Diversity or Hallucinated Variety? Persona-Conditioned Synthetic Query Generation for E-Commerce Search

    Oct 26, 2026Filippos Ventirozos, Tom Armitage, Mahmoud Oshagh +2E-Commerce SearchPersona-Conditioned Generation

  3. Don't Rewrite the SID Map: Topology Preservation for Generative Retrieval in Dynamic E-Commerce Search

    Oct 19, 2026Jianbo Zhu, Xing Fang, Xiaopeng Chu +5Generative RetrievalE-Commerce Search

  4. Language Models for Page-Level Layout Decisions in E-commerce Search

    Oct 7, 2026Varun Joshi, Eva C. Song, ChengXiang ZhaiE-Commerce SearchIR Evaluation

  5. Retail Product Search: A Practical Approach at Target

    Sep 25, 2026Darshan Sonagara, Qujiaheng Zhang, Ankit Singh +1E-Commerce SearchInformation Retrieval

  6. Beyond Relevance: Structured Semantic Supervision for Product Search with LLM-Augmented Annotations

    Sep 20, 2026Girish A. Koushik, Swapnil Bhosale, Samarth Agrawal +4Learning to RankLLM-Assisted Annotation

  7. The Language of the Question Selects the Market: Query Language and Exit IP as Separable Factors in Commercial Recommendations from a Generative Search Interface

    Aug 30, 2026Dmitrij ŻatuchinE-Commerce SearchLarge Language Model-Based Recommendation

  8. DCEO: Direct Causal Effect Optimization for Long-Term User Value Modeling in E-commerce Search

    Aug 26, 2026Junzhao Zhang, Tao Zhang, Liren Yu +4E-Commerce SearchLearning to Rank

  9. CVE-SAI: Counterfactual Visual Evidence-Guided Selective Attribute Indexing for Risk-Controlled E-commerce Search

    Aug 25, 2026Xiaolong Sun, Qichao Wang, Hangyu Li +1E-Commerce SearchProduct Attribute Extraction

  10. From Product Search to Preference Articulation: The Economics of Agentic Commerce

    Aug 9, 2026Lingxiu Dong, Kaiwen Luo, Fasheng XuAgentic SearchE-Commerce Search

  11. Improving Item Discoverability in e-Commerce Search via Related Intent Generation

    Jul 29, 2026Ji Xin, Xiao Xiao, Ishan Bhatt +6E-Commerce SearchInformation Retrieval

  12. Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation

    Jul 20, 2026Xiaohan Ye, Xu Chen, Zihan Gong +15Multimodal IRMultimodal Pretraining

  13. Enhancement of E-commerce Sponsored Search Relevancy with LLM

    Jul 4, 2026Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Andrei Simion, Weizhi Du +3LLM Fine-TuningE-Commerce Search

  14. Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants

    Jun 23, 2026Sarthak Harne, Natwar Modani, Debabrata Mahapatra +1E-Commerce SearchConversational Search

  15. QueryAgent-R1: Bridging Query Generation and Product Retrieval for E-Commerce Query Recommendation

    Jun 4, 2026Dike Sun, Zheng Zou, Jingtong Zang +3E-Commerce SearchAgentic Retrieval

  16. BEATS: Bootstrapping E-commerce Attribute Taxonomies for Search through Iterative Human-AI Collaboration

    Jun 3, 2026Yung-Yu Shih, Shang-Yu Su, Tzu-I Ho +2Semantic SearchLLM-Assisted Annotation

  17. Semantic Retrieval for Product Search in E-Commerce

    May 31, 2026Nikhil Kothari, Saksham Samdani, Ritam Mallick +3Learning to RankSemantic Search

  18. TIGER-FG: Text-Guided Implicit Fine-Grained Grounding for E-commerce Retrieval

    May 18, 2026Xinyu Sun, Huangyu Dai, Lingtao Mao +5Multimodal IRMultimodal Grounding

  19. Towards Sustainable Growth: A Multi-Value-Aware Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Search

    May 18, 2026Yifan Wang, Yixuan Wang, YiDan Liang +2Cold-Start RecommendationE-Commerce Search

  20. Efficient Generative Retrieval for E-commerce Search with Semantic Cluster IDs and Expert-Guided RL

    May 14, 2026Jianbo Zhu, Xing Fang, Jing Wang +5Semantic ID RecommendationE-Commerce Search

  21. From Unstructured to Structured: LLM-Guided Attribute Graphs for Entity Search and Ranking

    Apr 30, 2026Yilun Zhu, Nikhita Vedula, Shervin MalmasiKG ConstructionE-Commerce Search

  22. Shopping with a Platform AI Assistant: Who Adopts, When in the Journey, and What For

    Mar 26, 2026Se Yan, Han Zhong, Zemin +2Human-AI InteractionE-Commerce