Scoring, Not Learning: Decomposing Catalog-Consolidation Gains in Web-Scraped Retail Product Recognition

Kaden Leis, Xiang Ma

Retail product catalogs assembled from web image search are cheap to build and pervasively noisy: queries return packaging shots instead of products, and entries proliferate under names that cannot be distinguished visually. Consolidating such a catalog can look like an alternative to scaling the model. We show this is not a comparison between two ways of improving a recognizer, but between improving a recognizer and changing what counts as correct. We study a public archive of 165,769 cheese images across 1,824 query-named entries. A packaging filter and near-duplicate removal reduce it to a 998-class recognition set on one fixed, group-aware split. Canonicalizing entries to their base type (844 classes) raises top-1 accuracy by 4.0 points. Scoring the unchanged model against the merged label space, by summing its predicted probability within each canonical group, recovers +4.27 points with no retraining (+4.25 over six seeds). Retraining on the consolidated catalog then adds -0.10$\pm$0.53, +0.08$\pm$0.65 and -0.10$\pm$0.65 points at 28, 50 and 88 M parameters, indistinguishable from zero at every capacity ($\pm$ is the across-seed standard deviation). That component is…