Related papers: RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Pass…

Learned sparse and dense representations capture different successful approaches to text retrieval and the fusion of their results has proven to be more effective and robust. Prior work combines dense and sparse retrievers by fusing their…

R1-style Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet the mechanism behind rule-based RL remains unclear. We found that small-scale SFT has substantial influence on RL but shows poor…

Dense retrievers in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems exhibit systematic biases -- including brevity, position, literal matching, and repetition biases -- that can compromise retrieval quality. Query rewriting techniques are now…

Deep metric learning aims to transform input data into an embedding space, where similar samples are close while dissimilar samples are far apart from each other. In practice, samples of new categories arrive incrementally, which requires…

With the adoption of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), large language models (LLMs) are expected to ground their generation to the retrieved contexts. Yet, this is hindered by position bias of LLMs, failing to evenly attend to all…

Retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) must ensure that retrieved passages are not only individually relevant but also collectively form a comprehensive set. Existing approaches primarily rerank top-k passages based on their…

As a popular multilingual and multitask pre-trained speech model, Whisper has the problem of curse of multilinguality. To enhance multilingual capabilities in small Whisper models, we propose DQ-Whisper, a novel joint distillation and…

Retrieval models based on dense representations in semantic space have become an indispensable branch for first-stage retrieval. These retrievers benefit from surging advances in representation learning towards compressive global…

Large Language Models (LLM) have been widely used in reranking. Computational overhead and large context lengths remain a challenging issue for LLM rerankers. Efficient reranking usually involves selecting a subset of the ranked list from…

Knowledge Distillation (KD) based methods adopt the one-way Knowledge Transfer (KT) scheme in which training a lower-capacity student network is guided by a pre-trained high-capacity teacher network. Recently, Deep Mutual Learning (DML)…

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…

Evaluating automatically-generated text summaries is a challenging task. While there have been many interesting approaches, they still fall short of human evaluations. We present RISE, a new approach for evaluating summaries by leveraging…

Knowledge-intensive visual question answering requires models to effectively use external knowledge to help answer visual questions. A typical pipeline includes a knowledge retriever and an answer generator. However, a retriever that…

In the open book question answering (OBQA) task, selecting the relevant passages and sentences from distracting information is crucial to reason the answer to a question. HotpotQA dataset is designed to teach and evaluate systems to do both…

In Conversational Recommendation System (CRS), an agent is asked to recommend a set of items to users within natural language conversations. To address the need for both conversational capability and personalized recommendations, prior…

Most conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines rely on relevance-based retrieval, which often misaligns with utility -- that is, whether the retrieved passages actually improve the quality of the generated text specific to…

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…

State-of-the-art cross-encoders can be fine-tuned to be highly effective in passage re-ranking. The typical fine-tuning process of cross-encoders as re-rankers requires large amounts of manually labelled data, a contrastive learning…

Supervised ranking methods based on bi-encoder or cross-encoder architectures have shown success in multi-stage text ranking tasks, but they require large amounts of relevance judgments as training data. In this work, we propose Listwise…

According to common relevance-judgments regimes, such as TREC's, a document can be deemed relevant to a query even if it contains a very short passage of text with pertinent information. This fact has motivated work on passage-based…