Background: Instacart is a platform for buying groceries and everyday goods.
LLM in Query Understanding Challenging Queries
Overly general queries Overly specific queries (tail end queries) They use multiple models as components for query understanding: spell correction query normalization category, rewrites, brand, query tagging, aisle classification Product Category Classification Category Generation (User Query, Categories) tell llm to pick categories that are a exact match, (specific = good) Chain of Thought Verification of the categories Post Processing guardrails (embedding) Query Rewrite Given a Query Strong Substitute rewrite broader rewrite synonym rewrite LLM in Product Discovery Problem: When user selects a product, we would like to show products that user might add to the cart Basic Generation: Given a query, give me substitutes and complementary items. Augmented Generation: Query Query Annotations (Brand, Category, …) Items bought after this Diversity Based Reranking Serving Take search logs Call llm in a batch mode Store everything, content, metadata, even products During runtime use some content retrieval technique from AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 - LLM RECSYS Their blog on product discovery
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