# Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17499/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06031/) (2023)
- [Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06991/) (2022)
- [Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05065/) (2023)
- [Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09049/) (2023)
- [Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07001/) (2023)
- [Learning Tree-based Deep Model for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02294/) (2018)
- [Visual Search at eBay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03154/) (2017)
- [Learning a Unified Embedding for Visual Search at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01707/) (2019)
- [ItemSage: Learning Product Embeddings for Shopping Recommendations at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11728/) (2022)
- [FORGE: Forming Semantic Identifiers for Generative Retrieval in Industrial Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20904/) (2025)
- [eProduct: A Million-Scale Visual Search Benchmark to Address Product Recognition Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05856/) (2021)
- [PUMGPT: A Large Vision-Language Model for Product Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09568/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieval, visual search, and voice recognition, operate in isolation and cannot handle cross-modal queries, while general-purpose vision-language models lack the domain-specific knowledge necessary for fine-grained product understanding, user behavior modeling, and commercial intent reasoning. In this work, we present Pailitao-MMSearch, one native e-commerce multimodal search foundation model designed to bridge this gap. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1)HybSID (Hybrid Semantic ID);(2)a two-stage continual pre-training strategy; and (3)a hybrid reasoning post-training pipeline. Built upon Qwen and deployed on Taobao's Pailitao multimodal search platform, Pailitao-MMSearch achieves substantial improvements in online A/B testing, including up to +13.61% in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and +8.21% in transaction volume compared to traditional multi-modal search pipeline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our native e-commerce multimodal search large language models.