Vacuuming is one of those daily tasks that never really goes away. But as technology has advanced, new vacuums can handle cleaning your floors for you -- and with so many robot vacuum deals out there, you don't have to spend an arm and a leg to cross vacuuming off your to-do list. Right now at eBay, you can take an extra 20% off (up to $100) new and refurbished iRobot devices and accessories when you use promo code IROBOT20 at checkout. There's no minimum order requirements and you can use the promo code up to two times now through May 14. There are a ton of options available that can save you a little time and effort when tidying up, including the Roomba S9 Plus robot vacuum with a self-emptying base, which earned a spot on our list of the best robot vacuums for 2023.

Understanding the customers' high level shopping intent, such as their desire to go camping or hold a birthday party, is critically important for an E-commerce platform; it can help boost the quality of shopping experience by enabling provision of more relevant, explainable, and diversified recommendations. However, such high level shopping intent has been overlooked in the industry due to practical challenges. In this work, we introduce Amazon's new system that explicitly identifies and utilizes each customer's high level shopping intents for personalizing recommendations. We develop a novel technique that automatically identifies various high level goals being pursued by the Amazon customers, such as "go camping", and "preparing for a beach party". Our solution is in a scalable fashion (in 14 languages across 21 countries). Then a deep learning model maps each customer's online behavior, e.g. product search and individual item engagements, into a subset of high level shopping intents. Finally, a realtime ranker considers both the identified intents as well as the granular engagements to present personalized intent-aware recommendations. Extensive offline analysis ensures accuracy and relevance of the new recommendations and we further observe an 10% improvement in the business metrics. This system is currently serving online traffic at amazon.com, powering several production features, driving significant business impacts

And if you happen to be upgrading your PC in anticipation of Activision-Blizzard's next great dungeon crawler, Nvidia has a deal for you. If you buy a GeForce RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, 4080, or 4090, you'll get a digital code for Diablo IV for free, along with some in-game goodies for the game and other Blizzard titles. The offer is good from now until June 13th, and though the Rise Against Evil bundle is limited to "select retailers," it shouldn't be too hard to find -- these code bundles generally show up at all the major retailers. In addition to the $70 game (ouch), the code includes the Light-Bearer Mount and Caparison of Faith Armor for Diablo IV, Inarius Wings and Inarius Murloc pet for Diablo III, an Amalgam Rage Mount for World of Warcraft, and the Umber Winged Darkness Cosmetics set for the Diablo Immortal game for PCs and mobile devices. If that's not enough, the latest version of Diablo IV supports Nvidia's impressive DLSS 3 technology, which you can try out in the Server Slam Beta taking place between May 12th and 14th.

There is evidence that address matching plays a crucial role in many areas such as express delivery, online shopping and so on. Address has a hierarchical structure, in contrast to unstructured texts, which can contribute valuable information for address matching. Based on this idea, this paper proposes a novel method to leverage the hierarchical information in deep learning method that not only improves the ability of existing methods to handle irregular address, but also can pay closer attention to the special part of address. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed method improves the current approach by 3.2% points.

If you missed the chance to buy the Echo Show 8 when it was discounted to $75 at the start of April, Amazon has once again reduced the smart display to that price. The $55 cut means the Echo Show 8 is only $5 more than it was during Black Friday last year. If you've been eyeing one of Amazon's larger smart displays, the retailer has also reduced the price of the Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 15. You can get the company's largest smart display for $214.98, down from $279.98. Meanwhile, the Echo Show 10 is currently priced at $185.

In this paper, we describe a first publicly available fine-grained product recognition dataset based on leaflet images. Using advertisement leaflets, collected over several years from different European retailers, we provide a total of 41.6k manually annotated product images in 832 classes. Further, we investigate three different approaches for this fine-grained product classification task, Classification by Image, by Text, as well as by Image and Text. The approach "Classification by Text" uses the text extracted directly from the leaflet product images. We show, that the combination of image and text as input improves the classification of visual difficult to distinguish products. The final model leads to an accuracy of 96.4% with a Top-3 score of 99.2%. We release our code at https://github.com/ladwigd/Leaflet-Product-Classification.

Assortment optimization has received active explorations in the past few decades due to its practical importance. Despite the extensive literature dealing with optimization algorithms and latent score estimation, uncertainty quantification for the optimal assortment still needs to be explored and is of great practical significance. Instead of estimating and recovering the complete optimal offer set, decision-makers may only be interested in testing whether a given property holds true for the optimal assortment, such as whether they should include several products of interest in the optimal set, or how many categories of products the optimal set should include. This paper proposes a novel inferential framework for testing such properties. We consider the widely adopted multinomial logit (MNL) model, where we assume that each customer will purchase an item within the offered products with a probability proportional to the underlying preference score associated with the product. We reduce inferring a general optimal assortment property to quantifying the uncertainty associated with the sign change point detection of the marginal revenue gaps. We show the asymptotic normality of the marginal revenue gap estimator, and construct a maximum statistic via the gap estimators to detect the sign change point. By approximating the distribution of the maximum statistic with multiplier bootstrap techniques, we propose a valid testing procedure. We also conduct numerical experiments to assess the performance of our method.

Two factors had an effect on the deals we saw this week: spring sales and early Mother's Day promotions. Even if you don't need a gift for a mom or it's still cold (or weirdly summery hot) where you are, you can snag a decent price on some of our recommended tech. Like our top budget robot vacuum, iRobot's Roomba 694, which dropped back down to $179. Apple's only sub-$1,000 laptop, the MacBook Air M1, is $200 off at Best Buy only. We also saw a few deals on gadgets we like for the kitchen, like our favorite air fryer and a Vitamix blender. Both the latest and previous generation standard iPad are on sale, as is the older, but still-great M1 MacBook Air.

Never mind using AI to write stories -- Walmart is finding it helpful for landing a good bargain. The retailer tells Bloomberg that it's using a chatbot from Pactum AI to automatically negotiate some supplier deals. The technology is not only saving an average of three percent on contracts, but preferable to the vendors. Three out of four suppliers prefer haggling with the AI over a human, Walmart says. Pactum's system just asks Walmart to set its budget and requirements, such as discounts and payment terms.

The well-reviewed, yet pricey, PlayStation VR2 headset is making its way to retailers after a two-month stint of exclusivity at Sony's Direct consumer storefront. The company shared the news on Twitter, but has not set an official date or even announced what lucky retailers would get their mitts on the PS5-adjacent headset. Sony tells customers to check with local retailers for availability information. UK retailer ShopTo has suggested that the VR headset will be in stock starting May 12th, though it remains to be seen if that date holds for every online and brick-and-mortar retail location out there. It is worth noting that May 12th is when a little mom-and-pop video game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases on Switch, so get ready for crowds if you head into a store looking for just a VR headset.