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Query expansion has been widely used to improve the search results of first-stage retrievers, yet its influence on second-stage, cross-encoder rankers remains under-explored. A recent work of Weller et al. [44] shows that current expansion…

It has been shown that dual encoders trained on one domain often fail to generalize to other domains for retrieval tasks. One widespread belief is that the bottleneck layer of a dual encoder, where the final score is simply a dot-product…

Given its effectiveness on knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, dense retrieval models have become increasingly popular. Specifically, the de-facto architecture for open-domain question answering uses two isomorphic…

Rerankers, typically cross-encoders, are computationally intensive but are frequently used because they are widely assumed to outperform cheaper initial IR systems. We challenge this assumption by measuring reranker performance for full…

The use of deep pre-trained bidirectional transformers has led to remarkable progress in a number of applications (Devlin et al., 2018). For tasks that make pairwise comparisons between sequences, matching a given input with a corresponding…

Current state-of-the-art approaches to cross-modal retrieval process text and visual input jointly, relying on Transformer-based architectures with cross-attention mechanisms that attend over all words and objects in an image. While…

Establishing retrieval-based dialogue systems that can select appropriate responses from the pre-built index has gained increasing attention from researchers. For this task, the adoption of pre-trained language models (such as BERT) has led…

In this work we present a systematic empirical study focused on the suitability of the state-of-the-art multilingual encoders for cross-lingual document and sentence retrieval tasks across a number of diverse language pairs. We first treat…

Work on retrieval-based chatbots, like most sequence pair matching tasks, can be divided into Cross-encoders that perform word matching over the pair, and Bi-encoders that encode the pair separately. The latter has better performance,…

Modern approaches for fast retrieval of similar vectors on billion-scaled datasets rely on compressed-domain approaches such as binary sketches or product quantization. These methods minimize a certain loss, typically the mean squared error…

Pre-trained code models have emerged as the state-of-the-art paradigm for code search tasks. The paradigm involves pre-training the model on search-irrelevant tasks such as masked language modeling, followed by the fine-tuning stage, which…

This paper reviews, analyzes, and proposes a new perspective on the bi-encoder architecture for neural search. While the bi-encoder architecture is widely used due to its simplicity and scalability at test time, it has some notable issues…

We present a comparative study between cross-encoder and LLMs rerankers in the context of re-ranking effective SPLADE retrievers. We conduct a large evaluation on TREC Deep Learning datasets and out-of-domain datasets such as BEIR and…

With the recent success of dense retrieval methods based on bi-encoders, studies have applied this approach to various interesting downstream retrieval tasks with good efficiency and in-domain effectiveness. Recently, we have also seen the…

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…

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…

Ranking consistently emerges as a primary focus in information retrieval research. Retrieval and ranking models serve as the foundation for numerous applications, including web search, open domain QA, enterprise domain QA, and text-based…

Dense retrieval models have become a standard for state-of-the-art information retrieval. However, their high-dimensional, high-precision (float32) vector embeddings create significant storage and memory challenges for real-world…

Embedding models are central to dense retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems, but their size often makes them impractical to deploy in resource-constrained environments such as browsers or edge devices. While smaller…

Binary code similarity detection is a core task in reverse engineering. It supports malware analysis and vulnerability discovery by identifying semantically similar code in different contexts. Modern methods have progressed from manually…