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Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jiduan Liu , Jiahao Liu , Yang Yang , Jingang Wang , Wei Wu , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Although Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) demonstrate their superiority in terms of factuality, they do not consistently outperform the original retrieval-free Language Models (LMs). Our experiments reveal that this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Mingda Li , Xinyu Li , Yifan Chen , Wenfeng Xuan , Weinan Zhang

Recent work has shown that directly fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for dense retrieval yields strong performance, but their substantial parameter counts make them computationally inefficient. While prior studies have revealed…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yibin Lei , Shwai He , Ang Li , Andrew Yates

A vital step towards the widespread adoption of neural retrieval models is their resource efficiency throughout the training, indexing and query workflows. The neural IR community made great advancements in training effective dual-encoder…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Sebastian Hofstätter , Sheng-Chieh Lin , Jheng-Hong Yang , Jimmy Lin , Allan Hanbury

Deep learning networks have shown state-of-the-art performance in many image reconstruction problems. However, it is not well understood what properties of representation and learning may improve the generalization ability of the network.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Sandesh Ghimire , Prashnna Kumar Gyawali , Jwala Dhamala , John L Sapp , Milan Horacek , Linwei Wang

Dual-encoder-based neural retrieval models achieve appreciable performance and complement traditional lexical retrievers well due to their semantic matching capabilities, which makes them a common choice for hybrid IR systems. However,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jurek Leonhardt , Marcel Jahnke , Avishek Anand

Transformer-based Cross-Encoders achieve state-of-the-art effectiveness in text retrieval. However, Cross-Encoders based on large transformer models (such as BERT or T5) are computationally expensive and allow for scoring only a small…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Aleksandr V. Petrov , Sean MacAvaney , Craig Macdonald

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models~(LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Luyu Gao , Jamie Callan

Dimensionality reduction methods are unsupervised approaches which learn low-dimensional spaces where some properties of the initial space, typically the notion of "neighborhood", are preserved. Such methods usually require propagation on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Yannis Kalantidis , Carlos Lassance , Jon Almazan , Diane Larlus

Dense retrieval models are commonly used in Information Retrieval (IR) applications, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Since they often serve as the first step in these systems, their robustness is critical to avoid downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mohsen Fayyaz , Ali Modarressi , Hinrich Schuetze , Nanyun Peng

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Hansi Zeng , Julian Killingback , Hamed Zamani

In dense retrieval, deep encoders provide embeddings for both inputs and targets, and the softmax function is used to parameterize a distribution over a large number of candidate targets (e.g., textual passages for information retrieval).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Nicholas Monath , Will Grathwohl , Michael Boratko , Rob Fergus , Andrew McCallum , Manzil Zaheer

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shicheng Xu , Liang Pang , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

Dense retrieval approaches can overcome the lexical gap and lead to significantly improved search results. However, they require large amounts of training data which is not available for most domains. As shown in previous work (Thakur et…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Kexin Wang , Nandan Thakur , Nils Reimers , Iryna Gurevych

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Guangyuan Ma , Yongliang Ma , Xing Wu , Zhenpeng Su , Ming Zhou , Songlin Hu

Compact dual-encoder models are widely used for retrieval owing to their efficiency and scalability. However, such models often underperform compared to their Large Language Model (LLM)-based retrieval counterparts, likely due to their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Pranjal A. Chitale , Bishal Santra , Yashoteja Prabhu , Amit Sharma

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Jingtao Zhan , Jiaxin Mao , Yiqun Liu , Jiafeng Guo , Min Zhang , Shaoping Ma

Recent DEtection TRansformer-based (DETR) models have obtained remarkable performance. Its success cannot be achieved without the re-introduction of multi-scale feature fusion in the encoder. However, the excessively increased tokens in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Feng Li , Ailing Zeng , Shilong Liu , Hao Zhang , Hongyang Li , Lei Zhang , Lionel M. Ni

Dense retrieval, which encodes queries and documents into a single dense vector, has become the dominant neural retrieval approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with fast approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. As the tasks dense…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Julian Killingback , Mahta Rafiee , Madine Manas , Hamed Zamani

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown that models such as BERT are not ``structurally ready'' to aggregate textual information into a [CLS] vector for dense…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Sheng-Chieh Lin , Minghan Li , Jimmy Lin