MSURU: Large Scale E-commerce Image Classification with Weakly Supervised Search Data

Abstract

In this paper we present a deployed image recognition system used in a large scale commerce search engine, which we call MSURU. It is designed to process product images uploaded daily to Facebook Marketplace. Social commerce is a growing area within Facebook and understanding visual representations of product content is important for search and recommendation applications on Marketplace. In this paper, we present techniques we used to develop efficient large-scale image classifiers using weakly supervised search log data. We perform extensive evaluation of presented techniques, explain practical experience of developing large-scale classification systems and discuss challenges we faced. Our system, MSURU out-performed current state of the art system developed at Facebook [23] by 16% in e-commerce domain. MSURU is deployed to production with significant improvements in search success rate and active interactions on Facebook Marketplace.