mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Transformer-Based Substitute Recommendation Model Incorporating Weakly Supervised Customer Behavior Data

arXiv 2211.02533 ↗First posted 4 Nov 2022cs.IR cs.AI cs.CLcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

The substitute-based recommendation is widely used in E-commerce to provide better alternatives to customers. However, existing research typically uses the customer behavior signals like co-view and view-but-purchase-another to capture the substitute relationship. Despite its intuitive soundness, we find that such an approach might ignore the functionality and characteristics of products. In this paper, we adapt substitute recommendation into language matching problem by taking product title description as model input to consider product functionality. We design a new transformation method to de-noise the signals derived from production data. In addition, we consider multilingual support from the engineering point of view. Our proposed end-to-end transformer-based model achieves both successes from offline and online experiments. The proposed model has been deployed in a large-scale E-commerce website for 11 marketplaces in 6 languages. Our proposed model is demonstrated to increase revenue by 19% based on an online A/B experiment.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2022.

Builds on

19 of 39 references.

References · 19

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7 more
  1. 2020Correcting for Selection Bias in Learning-to-rank Systemscited by 35
  2. 2020Try This Instead: Personalized and Interpretable Substitute Recommendationcited by 34
  3. 2020Towards Personalized and Semantic Retrieval: An End-to-End Solution for E-commerce Search via Embedding Learningcited by 31
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.

4 papers.

  1. 2025AgentDR: Dynamic Recommendation with Implicit Item-Item Relations via LLM-based Agentscited by 3
  2. 2025Multi-modal Relational Item Representation Learning for Inferring Substitutable and Complementary Itemscited by 2
  3. 2024A Survey of Reasoning for Substitution Relationships: Definitions, Methods, and Directionscited by 0
  4. 2026ULTRA:Urdu Language Transformer-based Recommendation Architecturecited by 0