MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding

AbstractImproving user experience and providing personalized search results in E-commerce platforms heavily rely on understanding purchase intention. However, existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions bank on distilling large language models with human annotation for verification. Such an approach tends to generate product-centric intentions, overlook valuable visual information from product images, and incurs high costs for scalability. To address these issues, we introduce MIND, a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. Using Amazon Review data, we apply MIND and create a multimodal intention knowledge base, which contains 1,264,441 intentions derived from 126,142 co-buy shopping records across 107,215 products. Extensive human evaluations demonstrate the high plausibility and typicality of our obtained intentions and validate the effectiveness of our distillation framework and filtering mechanism. Further experiments reveal the positive downstream benefits that MIND brings to intention comprehension tasks and highlight the importance of multimodal generation and role-aware filtering. Additionally, MIND shows robustness to different prompts and superior generation quality compared to previous methods.