# Visual Search at Pinterest

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07647 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07647/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Visual Search at Alibaba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04674/) (2021)
- [Billion-Scale Pretraining with Vision Transformers for Multi-Task Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05887/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Personalized Ranking at Pinterest: An End-to-End Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08435/) (2022)
- [Sublinear Time Algorithm for Online Weighted Bipartite Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03367/) (2022)
- [Towards Zero-shot Cross-lingual Image Retrieval and Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07622/) (2021)
- [LRVS-Fashion: Extending Visual Search with Referring Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02928/) (2023)
- [A machine learning pipeline for aiding school identification from child trafficking images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05215/) (2021)
- [Evolution of a Web-Scale Near Duplicate Image Detection System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08433/) (2022)
- [Visually Similar Products Retrieval for Shopsy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04560/) (2022)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Visual Representation Learning And Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13399/) (2023)
- [Improve Supervised Representation Learning with Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00950/) (2023)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ranking Utility Tuning in the Ad Recommender System at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05292/) (2025)
- [Virtual ID Discovery from E-commerce Media at Alibaba: Exploiting Richness of User Click Behavior for Visual Search Relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04667/) (2021)
- [Style Similarity as Feedback for Product Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12256/) (2021)
- [Web-Scale Generic Object Detection at Microsoft Bing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01814/) (2021)
- [Simple and Effective Balance of Contrastive Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11743/) (2021)
- [ITEm: Unsupervised Image-Text Embedding Learning for eCommerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02084/) (2023)
- [Applying Deep Learning to Ads Conversion Prediction in Last Mile Delivery Marketplace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10514/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Purchase: Building and Evaluating a Taxonomy-Decoupled Visual Search Engine for Home Goods E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11769/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We demonstrate that, with the availability of distributed computation platforms such as Amazon Web Services and open-source tools, it is possible for a small engineering team to build, launch and maintain a cost-effective, large-scale visual search system with widely available tools. We also demonstrate, through a comprehensive set of live experiments at Pinterest, that content recommendation powered by visual search improve user engagement. By sharing our implementation details and the experiences learned from launching a commercial visual search engines from scratch, we hope visual search are more widely incorporated into today's commercial applications.