Pinterest Boosts Search Relevance with LLM Teacher‑Student Distillation
Pinterest replaced its legacy relevance model with a cross‑encoder LLM that scores pins on a five‑point relevance scale, then distilled that knowledge into a lightweight student model for real‑time inference. The new pipeline lifted click‑through rates by double‑digit percentages in live A/B tests, proving LLMs can power large‑scale search without sacrificing latency.