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arXiv · 2508.20013

Cross-Platform E-Commerce Product Categorization and Recategorization: A Multimodal Hierarchical Classification Approach

Lotte Gross·Rebecca Walter·Nicole Zoppi·Adrien Justus·Alessandro Gambetti·Qiwei Han·Maximilian Kaiser
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Abstract

This study addresses critical industrial challenges in e-commerce product categorization, namely platform heterogeneity and the structural limitations of existing taxonomies, by developing and deploying a multimodal hierarchical classification framework. Using a dataset of 271,700 products from 40 international fashion e-commerce platforms, we integrate textual features (RoBERTa), visual features (ViT), and joint vision-language representations (CLIP). We investigate fusion strategies, including early, late, and attention-based fusion within a hierarchical architecture enhanced by dynamic masking to ensure taxonomic consistency. Results show that CLIP embeddings combined via an MLP-based late-fusion strategy achieve the highest hierarchical F1 (98.59%), outperforming unimodal baselines. To address shallow or inconsistent categories, we further introduce a self-supervised "product recategorization" pipeline using SimCLR, UMAP, and cascade clustering, which discovered new, fine-grained categories (for example, subtypes of "Shoes") with cluster purities above 86%. Cross-platform experiments reveal a deployment-relevant trade-off: complex late-fusion methods maximize accuracy with diverse training data, while simpler early-fusion methods generalize more effectively to unseen platforms. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's industrial scalability through deployment in EURWEB's commercial transaction intelligence platform via a two-stage inference pipeline, combining a lightweight RoBERTa stage with a GPU-accelerated multimodal stage to balance cost and accuracy.

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Lotte Gross, Rebecca Walter, Nicole Zoppi, Adrien Justus, Alessandro Gambetti, Qiwei Han, Maximilian Kaiser. 2025-11-09. Cross-Platform E-Commerce Product Categorization and Recategorization: A Multimodal Hierarchical Classification Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20013

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