MEMENTO: Leveraging Web as a Learning Signal for Low-Data Domains

Real-world tasks often lack large labeled datasets, motivating extensive work on learning in low-data regimes. However, existing approaches such as few-shot prompting, instruction tuning, and synthetic data generation, continue to treat labeled or pseudo-labeled data as the primary learning signal. In contrast, human practitioners acquire expertise through repeated, self-directed interaction with the open web, progressively refining both domain knowledge and search strategies. We propose MEMENTO, a framework that treats the web as a learning signal rather than a stateless retrieval interface. MEMENTO operates at two levels: within each session, it conducts iterative web exploration via an Adaptive Exploration Tree (AET) that decomposes tasks into evolving questions and reflects on intermediate findings; across sessions, it accumulates experience through dual-channel memory, separating declarative knowledge (facts) from procedural knowledge (search strategies). This design enables agents to learn reusable research strategies and domain expertise from trajectories of web interaction without additional model training. We evaluate MEMENTO on two low-data professional domains: sales automation and legal research. Our empirical results show consistent improvements in performance over ReAct based baselines (+25.6% on sales automation and 36.5% on legal research), demonstrating that the web can serve as a scalable learning source for acquiring task-specific expertise in data-scarce settings.

Multi-modal Extreme Classification

This paper develops the MUFIN technique for extreme classification (XC) tasks with millions of labels where datapoints and labels are endowed with visual and textual descriptors. Applications of MUFIN to product-to-product recommendation and bid query prediction over several millions of products are presented. Contemporary multi-modal methods frequently rely on purely embedding-based methods. On the other hand, XC methods utilize classifier architectures to offer superior accuracies than embedding only methods but mostly focus on text-based categorization tasks. MUFIN bridges this gap by reformulating multi-modal categorization as an XC problem with several millions of labels. This presents the twin challenges of developing multi-modal architectures that can offer embeddings sufficiently expressive to allow accurate categorization over millions of labels; and training and inference routines that scale logarithmically in the number of labels. MUFIN develops an architecture based on cross-modal attention and trains it in a modular fashion using pre-training and positive and negative mining. A novel product-to-product recommendation dataset MM-AmazonTitles-300K containing over 300K products was curated from publicly available amazon.com listings with each product endowed with a title and multiple images. On the all datasets MUFIN offered at least 3% higher accuracy than leading text-based, image-based and multi-modal techniques. Code for MUFIN is available at https://github.com/Extreme-classification/MUFIN