Learning to Adjudicate: Verifier-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning for E-Commerce Relevance

Abstract

Relevance modeling is fundamental to e-commerce search, determining how well retrieved products satisfy the needs expressed in a user's query. Accurate judgments require interpreting user intent, comparing product attributes, and applying business-specific matching criteria. Current methods based on large language models (LLMs) leverage contextual understanding and reasoning, focusing on incorporating domain-specific context and enhancing reasoning performance. Despite these advances, difficult query-product pairs remain challenging when evidence from different perspectives supports conflicting conclusions. A single reasoning pass may fail to reconcile these conflicts and ensure that decisive evidence guides the final judgment. To address this challenge, we propose Collaborative Adjudication with Debate and Replay Experience (CADRE), a framework for evidence-based adjudication in e-commerce relevance assessment. CADRE organizes three expert agents sharing a frozen backbone to analyze product attributes, user intent, and business rules in separate contexts, while a trainable Verifier assesses their supporting evidence against the applicable matching criteria to determine relevance. Under expert disagreement, a Verifier-guided debate elicits targeted clarification and revision of disputed interpretations before final adjudication. We optimize the Verifier through multi-turn group relative policy optimization and adapt successful-experience replay so that trajectories yielding correct terminal labels can be reused alongside fresh rollouts in subsequent updates. For efficient online serving, we use CADRE as an offline teacher to distill its relevance judgments into a lightweight student model. Offline evaluations and online A/B tests on an e-commerce search advertising platform demonstrate that CADRE improves relevance classification and key business and relevance satisfaction metrics.