Now

2025

April

• Finished both Cloud Computing & Text Mining courses. Both are practical and I pretty like them, although I wish I can spent more times on some topic taught in lectures.
• Working on:
  • Non-English product search, i.e., adding supports to the indexing backend and autocomplete services.
  • Synonym supports. It’s more about allowing merchandisers to define their our product taxonomy, the most tricky part is how to adapt vector search to the customized definition from users w/o re-training models for each customer.

Mar

• Spent a considerable effort to hunt down search bad cases reported by customers. Reproducing issues is easy, but actually pinning the root cause is a completely different story. Long story short, it is due to wrong expanding terms for sparse models.
• Developed new codebase for embedding finetuning. Loved uv after completely switching to it. I also reported some bugs to neural-cherche. Still struggled to get good performance on Splade, SparseEmbed gave me some hope, but not much.
• Reading
  • Introduction to Information Retrieval
  • Amazon Web Services in Action: Assisted in completing assignments.
  • AI-Powered Search:  Engaging read, though some chapters were slightly disappointing.
• Traveled to Bangkok: What a journey. Much fun, best food in SEA (aside from VN), and got scammed.
• Study:
  • Tried some event detection models and implemented event deduplication. I don’t like the idea of using LLM for everything, but LLM actually is the best out-of-the-box solution for event detection.
  • Lots of coding for the other project: learned more about OpenAPI, FastAPI, mongoDB …

Feb

• A lot of coding & hacking:

  • Developing backend services for sport facility recommendation.
  • Play around with event detection and knowledge graph construction.

• Reading

  • Speech and Language Processing
  • DNF Mastering Regular Expressions. My short review

Jan

• Working on . DNF:

  • Spell checker - I’ll write a post about modern design of spell checker for product search.
  • Introduce personalization to rerank.
  • Try LoRA on language models.

• study@NUS: this semester I’ll take Cloud Computing and Text Mining courses.

• Reading

  • Cloud Computing
  • Introduction to Information Retrieval
  • Programming Pearls: Will go through all exercises in the book.

• Done:

  • DevOps, DataOps, MLOps: 2/5 - NOT Recommended.
  • GNU Make Book: Review.

2024

Dec

• Reading The Silmarillion.
• Working on threshold optimization.
  • Accuracy is maintained while performance improves between 50-80%, the first feature is released at the start of Y25.
• Improving multi-lingual search quality by finetuning BGE-M3.
  • It was a huge pain 😠 😠. I stopped working on it, the training is not stable with some random spikes of gradients that completely destroys the training.
• Studying: MLOps, AWS.
• Overhauled my homepage. I like the simplicity of the new theme.
  • Also added vale to my workflow.
  • Decoupled the deployment of lora from the homepage.
  • Upgraded to 11ty v3.
  • Added Github comments
• (VN) Reviewed Dune.