MAKE: Vision-Language Pre-training based Product Retrieval in Taobao Search

Taobao Search consists of two phases: the retrieval phase and the ranking phase. Given a user query, the retrieval phase returns a sub-set of candidate products for the following ranking phase. Recently, the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning has shown its potential in incorporating visual clues into retrieval tasks. In this paper, we focus on solving the problem of text-to-multimodal retrieval in Taobao Search.