Related papers: Predicting Efficiency/Effectiveness Trade-offs for…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential for improving retrieval model performance; however, previous studies have mainly focused on dense retrieval trained with contrastive loss (CL), neglecting the scaling behavior…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by leveraging a draft-then-verify paradigm. To maximize the acceptance rate, recent methods construct expansive draft trees, which unfortunately incur severe VRAM…

Passage retrieval and ranking is a key task in open-domain question answering and information retrieval. Current effective approaches mostly rely on pre-trained deep language model-based retrievers and rankers. These methods have been shown…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models can reduce computational costs by 2-4$\times$ compared to dense models without sacrificing performance, making them more efficient in computation-bounded scenarios. However, MoE models generally…

This paper considers Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) methods for dense retrievers in a resource constrained environment such as that of cheap cloud instances or embedded systems (e.g., smartphones and smartwatches), where memory and CPU are…

Small, highly trained, open-source large language models are widely used due to their inference efficiency, but further improving their quality remains a challenge. Sparse upcycling is a promising approach that transforms a pretrained dense…

Learned sparse document representations using a transformer-based neural model has been found to be attractive in both relevance effectiveness and time efficiency. This paper describes a representation sparsification scheme based on hard…

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem.…

Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models have achieved impressive performance on multimodal tasks, including text-image retrieval, based on dense representations. Meanwhile, Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) has gained traction in text-only…

Hybrid retrievers can take advantage of both sparse and dense retrievers. Previous hybrid retrievers leverage indexing-heavy dense retrievers. In this work, we study "Is it possible to reduce the indexing memory of hybrid retrievers without…

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using…

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the…

Despite their recent popularity and well-known advantages, dense retrievers still lag behind sparse methods such as BM25 in their ability to reliably match salient phrases and rare entities in the query and to generalize to out-of-domain…

We propose the new problem of choosing which dense retrieval model to use when searching on a new collection for which no labels are available, i.e. in a zero-shot setting. Many dense retrieval models are readily available. Each model…

A lot of recent work has focused on sparse learned indexes that use deep neural architectures to significantly improve retrieval quality while keeping the efficiency benefits of the inverted index. While such sparse learned structures…

In modern deep learning, algorithmic choices (such as width, depth, and learning rate) are known to modulate nuanced resource tradeoffs. This work investigates how these complexities necessarily arise for feature learning in the presence of…

DETR-like models have significantly boosted the performance of detectors and even outperformed classical convolutional models. However, all tokens are treated equally without discrimination brings a redundant computational burden in the…

The \textit{de facto} paradigm for applying dense retrieval (DR) to new tasks involves fine-tuning a pre-trained model for a specific task. However, this paradigm has two significant limitations: (1) It is difficult adapt the DR to a new…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) generation by using an efficient draft model to propose the next few tokens, which are verified by the LLM in a single forward call, reducing latency while preserving its…

Dense retrievers compress source documents into (possibly lossy) vector representations, yet there is little analysis of what information is lost versus preserved, and how it affects downstream tasks. We conduct the first analysis of the…