Related papers: A Discriminative Semantic Ranker for Question Retr…

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…

Open-domain complex Question Answering (QA) is a difficult task with challenges in evidence retrieval and reasoning. The complexity of such questions could stem from questions being compositional, hybrid evidence, or ambiguity in questions.…

In table-text open-domain question answering, a retriever system retrieves relevant evidence from tables and text to answer questions. Previous studies in table-text open-domain question answering have two common challenges: firstly, their…

In agent memory systems, the reranking model serves as the critical bridge connecting user queries with long-term memory. Most systems adopt the "retrieve-then-rerank" two-stage paradigm, but generic reranking models rely on semantic…

Recent developments of dense retrieval rely on quality representations of queries and contexts from pre-trained query and context encoders. In this paper, we introduce TOUR (Test-Time Optimization of Query Representations), which further…

For multi-stage recommenders in industry, a user request would first trigger a simple and efficient retriever module that selects and ranks a list of relevant items, then the recommender calls a slower but more sophisticated reranking model…

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking…

In information retrieval, learning to rank constructs a machine-based ranking model which given a query, sorts the search results by their degree of relevance or importance to the query. Neural networks have been successfully applied to…

Term frequency is a common method for identifying the importance of a term in a query or document. But it is a weak signal, especially when the frequency distribution is flat, such as in long queries or short documents where the text is of…

Recent advances in dense retrieval techniques have offered the promise of being able not just to re-rank documents using contextualised language models such as BERT, but also to use such models to identify documents from the collection in…

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate…

Large-scale text retrieval technology has been widely used in various practical business scenarios. This paper presents our systems for the TREC 2022 Deep Learning Track. We explain the hybrid text retrieval and multi-stage text ranking…

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the…

Current state-of-the-art approaches to cross-modal retrieval process text and visual input jointly, relying on Transformer-based architectures with cross-attention mechanisms that attend over all words and objects in an image. While…

Retrieve-and-rerank is a popular retrieval pipeline because of its ability to make slow but effective rerankers efficient enough at query time by reducing the number of comparisons. Recent works in neural rerankers take advantage of large…

Generative retrieval is a promising new neural retrieval paradigm that aims to optimize the retrieval pipeline by performing both indexing and retrieval with a single transformer model. However, this new paradigm faces challenges with…

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…

We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation…

Dense retrieval has shown promising results in many information retrieval (IR) related tasks, whose foundation is high-quality text representation learning for effective search. Some recent studies have shown that autoencoder-based language…

The conventional paradigm in neural question answering (QA) for narrative content is limited to a two-stage process: first, relevant text passages are retrieved and, subsequently, a neural network for machine comprehension extracts the…