Related papers: Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retriev…

Recent years have witnessed great progress on applying pre-trained language models, e.g., BERT, to information retrieval (IR) tasks. Hyperlinks, which are commonly used in Web pages, have been leveraged for designing pre-training…

Pre-training on larger datasets with ever increasing model size is now a proven recipe for increased performance across almost all NLP tasks. A notable exception is information retrieval, where additional pre-training has so far failed to…

Designing pre-training objectives that more closely resemble the downstream tasks for pre-trained language models can lead to better performance at the fine-tuning stage, especially in the ad-hoc retrieval area. Existing pre-training…

In this paper, we systematically study the potential of pre-training with Large Language Model(LLM)-based document expansion for dense passage retrieval. Concretely, we leverage the capabilities of LLMs for document expansion, i.e. query…

Prompt-based learning's efficacy across numerous natural language processing tasks has led to its integration into dense passage retrieval. Prior research has mainly focused on enhancing the semantic understanding of pre-trained language…

Over recent years, an increasing amount of compute and data has been poured into training large language models (LLMs), usually by doing one-pass learning on as many tokens as possible randomly selected from large-scale web corpora. While…

We introduce HTLM, a hyper-text language model trained on a large-scale web crawl. Modeling hyper-text has a number of advantages: (1) it is easily gathered at scale, (2) it provides rich document-level and end-task-adjacent supervision…

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…

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking is done in one of two ways: (1) prompt-based re-ranking methods, which require no further training but are only feasible for re-ranking a handful of candidate documents…

Dense retrievers for open-domain question answering (ODQA) have been shown to achieve impressive performance by training on large datasets of question-passage pairs. In this work we ask whether this dependence on labeled data can be reduced…

Text retrieval using learned dense representations has recently emerged as a promising alternative to "traditional" text retrieval using sparse bag-of-words representations. One recent work that has garnered much attention is the dense…

Quality pretraining data is often seen as the key to high-performance language models. However, progress in understanding pretraining data has been slow due to the costly pretraining runs required for data selection experiments. We present…

Reading Comprehension has received significant attention in recent years as high quality Question Answering (QA) datasets have become available. Despite state-of-the-art methods achieving strong overall accuracy, Multi-Hop (MH) reasoning…

Large language models produce powerful text embeddings, but their causal attention mechanism restricts the flow of information from later to earlier tokens, degrading representation quality. While recent methods attempt to solve this by…

Large Language Model (LLM)-based passage expansion has shown promise for enhancing first-stage retrieval, but often underperforms with dense retrievers due to semantic drift and misalignment with their pretrained semantic space. Beyond…

We propose a simple and efficient multi-hop dense retrieval approach for answering complex open-domain questions, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on two multi-hop datasets, HotpotQA and multi-evidence FEVER. Contrary to previous…

Prompt-based learning, with its capability to tackle zero-shot and few-shot NLP tasks, has gained much attention in community. The main idea is to bridge the gap between NLP downstream tasks and language modeling (LM), by mapping these…

Language model (LM) pretraining can learn various knowledge from text corpora, helping downstream tasks. However, existing methods such as BERT model a single document, and do not capture dependencies or knowledge that span across…

Large language models show impressive results on few-shot NLP tasks. However, these models are memory and computation-intensive. Meta-training allows one to leverage smaller models for few-shot generalization in a domain-general and…

Large pre-trained models can dramatically reduce the amount of task-specific data required to solve a problem, but they often fail to capture domain-specific nuances out of the box. The Web likely contains the information necessary to excel…