Related papers: Learning To Retrieve: How to Train a Dense Retriev…

Large Language Model-based Dense Retrieval (LLM-DR) optimizes over numerous heterogeneous fine-tuning collections from different domains. However, the discussion about its training data distribution is still minimal. Previous studies rely…

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…

Dense retrievers have achieved impressive performance, but their demand for abundant training data limits their application scenarios. Contrastive pre-training, which constructs pseudo-positive examples from unlabeled data, has shown great…

Existing multilingual embedding models often encounter challenges in cross-lingual scenarios due to imbalanced linguistic resources and less consideration of cross-lingual alignment during training. Although standardized contrastive…

Sparse document representations have been widely used to retrieve relevant documents via exact lexical matching. Owing to the pre-computed inverted index, it supports fast ad-hoc search but incurs the vocabulary mismatch problem. Although…

We consider the large-scale query-document retrieval problem: given a query (e.g., a question), return the set of relevant documents (e.g., paragraphs containing the answer) from a large document corpus. This problem is often solved in two…

Dense Retrieval (DR) reaches state-of-the-art results in first-stage retrieval, but little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to its success. Therefore, in this work, we conduct an interpretation study of recently proposed DR…

While the current state-of-the-art dense retrieval models exhibit strong out-of-domain generalization, they might fail to capture nuanced domain-specific knowledge. In principle, fine-tuning these models for specialized retrieval tasks…

Long-tail question answering presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to their limited ability to acquire and accurately recall less common knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have shown great…

Dense retrieval overcome the lexical gap and has shown great success in ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Despite their success, dense retrievers are expensive to serve across practical use cases. For use cases requiring to search from…

Long Document retrieval (DR) has always been a tremendous challenge for reading comprehension and information retrieval. The pre-training model has achieved good results in the retrieval stage and Ranking for long documents in recent years.…

Tables are an important form of structured data for both human and machine readers alike, providing answers to questions that cannot, or cannot easily, be found in texts. Recent work has designed special models and training paradigms for…

Web-scale search systems typically tackle the scalability challenge with a two-step paradigm: retrieval and ranking. The retrieval step, also known as candidate selection, often involves extracting standardized entities, creating an…

Many discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have large label spaces. Learning such a process of large-space decision making is particularly challenging due to the lack of training instances per label and the difficulty of…

Neural information retrieval architectures based on transformers such as BERT are able to significantly improve system effectiveness over traditional sparse models such as BM25. Though highly effective, these neural approaches are very…

This paper describes a machine learning algorithm for document (re)ranking, in which queries and documents are firstly encoded using BERT [1], and on top of that a learning-to-rank (LTR) model constructed with TF-Ranking (TFR) [2] is…

Dense retrieval has shown promise in the first-stage retrieval process when trained on in-domain labeled datasets. However, previous studies have found that dense retrieval is hard to generalize to unseen domains due to its weak modeling of…

Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) is a family of first-stage retrieval methods that are trained to generate sparse lexical representations of queries and documents for use with an inverted index. Many LSR methods have been recently introduced,…

Neural sentence embedding models for dense retrieval typically rely on binary relevance labels, treating query-document pairs as either relevant or irrelevant. However, real-world relevance often exists on a continuum, and recent advances…

Deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in various vision and/or language tasks. Despite the use of large training datasets, most models are trained by iterating over single input-output pairs, discarding the remaining…