Junior interview questionAsked at Walmart · interview write-up
Design an item category prediction system for a large catalogue, handling hierarchical labels, multimodal features and label quality.
Model answer
Predict a path in the taxonomy, like Home, Kitchen, Cookware. Encode the title, description and image and combine them. Predict level by level, or the leaf with a loss that respects the tree so mistakes stay nearby. Seller labels are noisy, so clean them with agreement checks, and send low-confidence items to review.
Practise the rest
40 ML system design questions, 492 in all, each with a model answer. Free.
More from Walmart interview questions.
More ML system design interview questions
- You need to copy 500 GB of weights to 1,000 GPU workers over shared 10 Gbps links. What's the lower bound on time, and what would you build?
- Design an LLM coding assistant end to end: data, model and evaluation.
- Design a job scheduler for ML training and batch inference on a shared GPU cluster.
- Training a retrieval model over a catalogue of millions of items, you use sampled softmax. Why does it need a correction, and how do you choose the classification loss?
- Design an inference API that converts PDFs into Markdown using several models in stages.
- How can LLMs be incorporated into recommendation systems, from metadata enrichment and cold start to generative retrieval and semantic reranking?