Related papers: Optimizing Test-Time Query Representations for Den…

The proliferation of misinformation necessitates robust yet computationally efficient fact verification systems. While current state-of-the-art approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating explanatory rationales, these…

Search engines operate under a strict time constraint as a fast response is paramount to user satisfaction. Thus, neural re-ranking models have a limited time-budget to re-rank documents. Given the same amount of time, a faster re-ranking…

Recent work on the Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) model has shown that off-loading memory from trainable weights to a retrieval database can significantly improve language modeling and match the performance of non-retrieval models…

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…

Pre-trained deep language models~(LM) have advanced the state-of-the-art of text retrieval. Rerankers fine-tuned from deep LM estimates candidate relevance based on rich contextualized matching signals. Meanwhile, deep LMs can also be…

We propose a novel approach to semi-supervised automatic speech recognition (ASR). We first exploit a large amount of unlabeled audio data via representation learning, where we reconstruct a temporal slice of filterbank features from past…

Dual encoders are now the dominant architecture for dense retrieval. Yet, we have little understanding of how they represent text, and why this leads to good performance. In this work, we shed light on this question via distributions over…

The advent of contextualised language models has brought gains in search effectiveness, not just when applied for re-ranking the output of classical weighting models such as BM25, but also when used directly for passage indexing and…

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms,…

DETR-like methods have significantly increased detection performance in an end-to-end manner. The mainstream two-stage frameworks of them perform dense self-attention and select a fraction of queries for sparse cross-attention, which is…

One technique to improve the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is to expand documents with terms that are related or representative of the documents' content.From the perspective of a question answering system, this might comprise…

Search engines often follow a two-phase paradigm where in the first stage (the retrieval stage) an initial set of documents is retrieved and in the second stage (the re-ranking stage) the documents are re-ranked to obtain the final result…

While language models have shown remarkable performance across diverse tasks, they still encounter challenges in complex reasoning scenarios. Recent research suggests that language models trained on linearized search traces toward…

Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) has significantly advanced in addressing the challenges of conversational search, particularly those stemming from the latent user intent and the need for historical context. Recent works aimed to…

Over the last few years, contextualized pre-trained transformer models such as BERT have provided substantial improvements on information retrieval tasks. Recent approaches based on pre-trained transformer models such as BERT, fine-tune…

Recurrent models for sequences have been recently successful at many tasks, especially for language modeling and machine translation. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract good representations from these models. For instance, even…

Recent work has shown that more effective dense retrieval models can be obtained by distilling ranking knowledge from an existing base re-ranking model. In this paper, we propose a generic curriculum learning based optimization framework…

Domain-specific finetuning is essential for dense retrievers, yet not all training pairs contribute equally to the learning process. We introduce OPERA, a data pruning framework that exploits this heterogeneity to improve both the…

This paper democratizes neural information retrieval to scenarios where large scale relevance training signals are not available. We revisit the classic IR intuition that anchor-document relations approximate query-document relevance and…

Test-time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) has shown promise in adapting foundation models for complex tasks at test-time, resulting in large performance improvements. TTRL leverages an elegant two-phase sampling strategy: first,…