text: In this study, we investigated multi-modal approaches using images, descriptions, and title to categorize e-commerce products on this http URL. Specifically, we examined late fusion models, where the modalities are fused at the decision level. Products were each assigned multiple labels, and the hierarchy in the labels were flattened and filtered. For our individual baseline models, we modified a CNN architecture to classify the description and title, and then modified Keras' ResNet-50 to classify the images, achieving F1 scores of 77.0 , 82.7 , and 61.0 , respectively. In comparison, our tri-modal late fusion model can classify products more accurately than single modal models can, improving the F1 score to 88.2 . Each modality complemented the shortcomings of the other modalities, demonstrating that increasing the number of modalities can be an effective method for improving the accuracy of multi-label classification problems.
  @cite_22: Classifying products into categories precisely and efficiently is a major challenge in modern e-commerce. The high traffic of new products uploaded daily and the dynamic nature of the categories raise the need for machine learning models that can reduce the cost and time of human editors. In this paper, we propose a decision level fusion approach for multi-modal product classification using text and image inputs. We train input specific state-of-the-art deep neural networks for each input source, show the potential of forging them together into a multi-modal architecture and train a novel policy network that learns to choose between them. Finally, we demonstrate that our multi-modal network improves the top-1 accuracy @math over both networks on a real-world large-scale product classification dataset that we collected from Walmart.com. While we focus on image-text fusion that characterizes e-commerce domains, our algorithms can be easily applied to other modalities such as audio, video, physical sensors, etc.
summary: The dataset contained 96,806 products belonging to 193 different classes. Note that each product was assigned to one class. Hence @math berg applied a softmax function in the final layer before outputting the class probabilities. Similar to @cite_22 , both late and early fusion were explored, and late fusion yielded better results. Both heuristic policies and network policies were explored. Heuristic policies refer to some static rule; as an example, the mean of the probabilities from different modals. Network policies refer to training a neural network that takes the output probabilities from different networks and produces a new probability vector.