Constraining Latent Space to Improve Deep Self-Supervised e-Commerce Products Embeddings for Downstream Tasks

The representation of products in a e-commerce marketplace is a key aspect to be exploited when trying to improve the user experience on the site. A well known example of the importance of a good product representation are tasks such as product search or product recommendation. There is however a multitude of lesser known tasks relevant to the business, examples are the detection of counterfeit items, the estimation of package sizes or the categorization of products, among others. It is in this setting that good vector representations of products that can be reused on different tasks are very valuable. Past years have seen a major increase in research in the area of latent representations for products in e-Commerce. Examples of this are models like Prod2Vec or Meta-Prod2Vec which leverage from the information of a user session in order to generate vectors of the products that can be used in product recommendations. This work proposes a novel deep encoder model for learning product embeddings to be applied in several downstream tasks. The model uses pairs of products that appear together in a browsing session of the users and adds a proximity constraint to the final latent space in order to project the embeddings of similar products close to each other. This has a regularization effect which gives better features representations to use across multiple downstream tasks, we explore such effect in our experimentation by assessing its impact on the performance of the tasks. Our experiments show effectiveness in transfer learning scenarios comparable to several industrial baselines.