Accurate mapping of queries to product categories is crucial for efficient retrieval and ranking of relevant products in e-commerce search. Conventionally, such query classification models rely on supervised learning using historical user interactions, but their effectiveness diminishes in cold-start scenarios, where new categories or products lack sufficient training data. This results in poor query-to-category mappings, negatively affecting retrieval and ranking. Synthetic query generation has emerged as a promising solution by augmenting training data; however, existing methods do not incorporate feedback from the query relevance model, limiting their ability to generate queries that enhance product retrieval. To address this, we propose an adversarial reinforcement learning framework that optimizes an LLM-based generator to expose weaknesses in query classification models. The generator produces synthetic queries to augment the classifier’s training set, ultimately improving its performance. Additionally, we introduce a structured reward signal to ensure stable training. Experiments on public datasets show an average PR-AUC improvement of +1.82% on benchmarks and +3.26% on a proprietary dataset, demonstrating the framework’s effectiveness in enhancing query classification and mitigating cold-start challenges.

Automated construction of shopping cart frommedical prescriptions is a vital prerequisite forscaling up online pharmaceutical servicesin emerging markets due to the high prevalence of paper prescriptionsthat are challenging for customers to interpret.We present RxLens, a multi-step end-end Large Language Model (LLM)-based deployed solutionfor automated pharmacy cart construction comprisingmultiple steps: redaction of Personal Identifiable Information (PII),Optical Character Recognition (OCR), medication extraction, matching against the catalog, and bounding box detection for lineage. Our multi-step design leverages the synergy between retrieval and LLM-based generationto mitigate the vocabulary gaps in LLMs and fuzzy matching errors during retrieval.Empirical evaluation demonstrates that RxLens can yield up to 19% - 40% and 11% - 26% increase in Recall@3 relative to SOTA methods such as Medical Comprehend and vanilla retrieval augmentation of LLMs on handwritten and printed prescriptions respectively.We also explore LLM-based auto-evaluation as an alternative to costly manual annotations and observe a 76% - 100% match relative to human judgements on various tasks.

Identifying preferences of customers in their shopping journey is a pivotal aspect in providing product recommendations. The task becomes increasingly challenging when there is a multi-turn conversation between the user and a shopping assistant chatbot. In this paper, we tackle a novel and complex problem of identifying customer preferences in the form of key-value filters on an e-commerce website in a multi-turn conversational setting. Existing systems specialize in extracting customer preferences from standalone customer queries which makes them unsuitable to multi-turn setup. We propose PEARL (Preference Extraction with ICL Augmentation and Retrieval with LLM Agents) that leverages collaborative LLM agents, generates in-context learning exemplars and dynamically retrieves relevant exemplars during inference time to extract customer preferences as a combination of key-value filters. Our experiments on proprietary and public datasets show that PEARL not only improves performance on exact match by ~10% compared to competitive LLM-based baselines but additionally improves inference latency by ~110%.