Aligning Query Rewriting with Human Cognition and Preference in E-Commerce Search

In e-commerce search, the diverse ways in which users express intentions lead to lexical and semantic gaps between queries and product descriptions, making query rewriting (QR) indispensable for improving matching efficiency. With the development of LLMs, QR has evolved from discriminative approaches to various LLM-based alignment methods. However, these methods typically treat all queries uniformly, without fundamentally distinguishing their rewriting difficulty or underlying linguistic issues, making the rewritten query deviate from human expectations. To address this limitation, we propose AWHCP (Aligning with Human Cognition and Preference), a novel framework that adopts a human-centric perspective and introduces the Problem–Intention–Fix–Rewrite (PIFR) paradigm. Built upon PIFR, AWHCP establishes a multi-granularity alignment training framework that simultaneously aligns with both system retrieval preferences and human rewriting behaviors. First, we construct high-quality PIFR-structured data and perform supervised fine-tuning to enable the model to learn human-like rewriting patterns. Second, we apply beam search to generate multiple candidates and leverage system-side feedback signals to conduct coarse-grained direct preference alignment, endowing the model with initial difficulty-aware reasoning capabilities. Third, we introduce a multi-dimensional rewrite quality judgment model trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling fine-grained alignment with nuanced human rewriting preferences. Deployed on 1688's main search engine since August 2025, AWHCP has demonstrated strong effectiveness through extensive offline evaluations and large-scale online A/B tests, leading to a +3.9% gain in UV-L2O.