English

RetroMAE v2: Duplex Masked Auto-Encoder For Pre-Training Retrieval-Oriented Language Models

Computation and Language 2022-11-17 v1 Information Retrieval

Abstract

To better support retrieval applications such as web search and question answering, growing effort is made to develop retrieval-oriented language models. Most of the existing works focus on improving the semantic representation capability for the contextualized embedding of [CLS] token. However, recent study shows that the ordinary tokens besides [CLS] may provide extra information, which helps to produce a better representation effect. As such, it's necessary to extend the current methods where all contextualized embeddings can be jointly pre-trained for the retrieval tasks. With this motivation, we propose a new pre-training method: duplex masked auto-encoder, a.k.a. DupMAE, which targets on improving the semantic representation capacity for the contextualized embeddings of both [CLS] and ordinary tokens. It introduces two decoding tasks: one is to reconstruct the original input sentence based on the [CLS] embedding, the other one is to minimize the bag-of-words loss (BoW) about the input sentence based on the entire ordinary tokens' embeddings. The two decoding losses are added up to train a unified encoding model. The embeddings from [CLS] and ordinary tokens, after dimension reduction and aggregation, are concatenated as one unified semantic representation for the input. DupMAE is simple but empirically competitive: with a small decoding cost, it substantially contributes to the model's representation capability and transferability, where remarkable improvements are achieved on MS MARCO and BEIR benchmarks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.08769,
  title  = {RetroMAE v2: Duplex Masked Auto-Encoder For Pre-Training Retrieval-Oriented Language Models},
  author = {Shitao Xiao and Zheng Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.08769},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:01:16.865Z