Name: Road to sparse encoders: Bridging product catalogs and knowledge graphs
Start: 2026-05-28T12:00:00+0200
End: 2026-05-28T12:30:00+0200

Road to sparse encoders: Bridging product catalogs and knowledge graphs

FULL

Thursday May 28, 2026 12:00 - 12:30 CEST

4 - MEDIUM STAGE

Limited Capacity full
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In the retail industry, the accuracy of product to concept mapping is the backbone of customer experience. At Leroy Merlin France, this represents a massive operational challenge: over 5.7M product-concept pairs (out of 67M) currently show poor semantic alignment, leading to misclassified products. Furthermore, at search time, 15.8% of the customer terms remain unmapped to our Search & Pub Knowledge Graph, inducing lower recall and precision. Solving these issues are a massive business opportunity.
While dense embeddings became the standard about semantic alignment, they often lack the lexical precision needed to fix these specific business gaps. This led us to explore an alternative: **Sparse Encoders**, a solution designed to bridge our massive product catalog with the explicitness of Knowledge Graphs to reclaim these lost data points.
We will walk through the evolution of our approach: from traditional term expansion (SPLADE) to a custom model with a key innovation: **using KG concepts themselves as tokens**. I will share the "behind-the-scenes" of our experimentation, including:
* **The Technical Pivot**: Why we moved from generative Seq2Seq models to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) and finally settled on a Distillation strategy.
* **Implementation Hardships**: Deep dive into the challenges of GPU optimization, custom DataCollators, and refining loss functions to enforce sparsity without losing semantic depth.
* **Real-world Results**: How we achieved 99%+ sparsity while maintaining alignment for complex product categories.

Beyond the code, this talk is a feedback loop on **data quality and model refinement**. Whether you are working on search, recommendation or data classification, you will gain practical insights into leveraging Sparse Encoders to build more robust and interpretable data products.

Speakers

Francois Gaillard

Digital Product Leader, ADEO Services

Engineering Manager at Adeo (Leroy Merlin, Bricoman) in AAAI team (Advanced Analysis and Artificial Intelligence) in Search & Publication domain. Last 10 years building and running AI powered search engines for e-commerce websites. PhD in computer science, specialized in Artificial... Read More →

Thursday May 28, 2026 12:00 - 12:30 CEST
4 - MEDIUM STAGE

Data / AI, Conference

Audience Advanced

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Dev Summit 2026

Francois Gaillard

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Dev Summit 2026

Francois Gaillard

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