Upstage takes first place in Kaggle AI competition

Upstage, a startup that helps companies with AI transformation, took first place in the Price Match Guarantee competition, organized by Kaggle, a Google subsidiary, and hosted by global online marketplace Shopee.

The Price Match Guarantee competition ran for about two months starting in March. With a total prize pool of $30,000 (33 million won), it drew 2,464 teams and 3,079 participants from around the world. South Korea’s startup Upstage, represented by team lead Sanghoon Kim and Yunsu Kim, took first place.

Hosted by Shopee, an online shopping platform serving Southeast Asia and South America, the competition challenged participants to use AI to group identical products on online shopping sites and improve the accuracy of those groupings for price comparisons.

Grouping identical products and displaying their prices side by side helps online shoppers find the lowest price. But when products are not grouped correctly, users must check product detail pages to determine whether listings are for the same item. Upstage took first place by raising the accuracy of its identical-product groupings (F1 score) to 0.780. Teams from Japan and Russia placed next.

For the competition, Upstage built a multimodal model that uses both images and text, and applied advanced engineering techniques to cluster identical products. The technology is expected to be useful in commerce, including online shopping, a sector that has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sanghoon Kim, the Upstage team lead who led the team in the competition, said, “We’re delighted that this win has shown the world that Upstage has AI capabilities at the highest level.” He added, “Upstage will continue to make a broad range of efforts to advance its AI technology.”

Yunsu Kim, an intern in Upstage’s Global Residency program who worked with Sanghoon Kim on the achievement, said, “When I first started the Upstage Global Residency, I never imagined we would achieve such a great result.” Kim added, “I’m really happy to have achieved results so quickly by taking on a real-world challenge alongside Sanghoon, a Kaggle Grandmaster.”