Adaptive E-Commerce Search Optimization Using Large Language Models and Dynamic User Interest Memory Networks

Authors

  • Nicolas Remos Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
  • Arjun C. Tripathi Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.
  • Rainer Fox Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA.

Keywords:

e-commerce search, large language models, user memory networks, personalization, information retrieval, fairness, system architecture

Abstract

The rapid growth of e-commerce platforms has made product search a critical interface between consumers and vast digital catalogs, yet traditional retrieval and ranking pipelines struggle to capture the fluid and context-dependent nature of user intent. This paper presents a comprehensive system-level investigation of adaptive e-commerce search optimization that integrates large language models with dynamic user interest memory networks. We examine the architectural fusion of transformer-based language understanding with dynamically updating memory components that continuously encode short-term and long-term user preferences, session context, and cross-session behavioral signals. The discussion is organized around structural trade-offs, infrastructure design, deployment considerations, and governance challenges, including fairness, robustness, privacy, and sustainability. By situating the proposed approach within the broader evolution from feature-based learning to rank and neural retrieval models, we analyze how memory-augmented large language models can enable more coherent and personalized query matching and intent modeling. The paper does not present a single system implementation but instead develops a holistic research perspective that connects advances in dense retrieval, interest evolution networks, and zero-shot ranking capabilities with the systemic demands of production-scale e-commerce environments. Throughout, we emphasize the interplay between model expressiveness and operational constraints, the necessity of continuous model updating to combat concept drift, the policy implications of profiling user memory, and the environmental costs of serving large generative models at scale. The analysis is grounded in recent literature and provides forward-looking perspectives on building inclusive, privacy-preserving, and energy-efficient search systems that respect user autonomy while delivering high-quality discovery experiences.

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33. Mehrabi, N., Morstatter, F., Saxena, N., Lerman, K., & Galstyan, A. (2021). A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys, 54(6), 1-35.

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Published

2026-06-08