English

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

Artificial Intelligence 2026-07-20 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.17499,
  title  = {Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation},
  author = {Xiaohan Ye and Xu Chen and Zihan Gong and Jian Ding and Lianyu Du and Baicheng Chen and Yunmeng Shu and Jingqian Zhao and Zhixiang Zhao and Shuaiqi Jia and Chong Ma and Shuwen Xiao and Xiangheng Kong and Yuan Gao and Jun Song and Jinsong Lan and Xiaoyong Zhu and Bo Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.17499},
  year   = {2026}
}

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Technical Report: Pailitao-MMSearch