Research

In this paper, we present VisRel, a deployed large-scale media search system that leverages text understanding, media understanding, and multimodal technologies to deliver a modern multimedia search experience. We share our insight on developing image and video understanding models for content retrieval, training efficient and effective media-to-query relevance models, and refining online and offline metrics to measure the success of one of the largest media search databases in the industry. We summarize our learnings gathered from hundreds of A/B test experiments and describe the most effective technical approaches. The techniques presented in this work have contributed 34% (abs.) improvement to media-to-query relevance and 10% improvement to user engagement. We believe that this work can provide practical solutions and insights for engineers who are interested in applying media understanding technologies to empower multimedia search systems that operate at Facebook scale.