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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…

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…

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…

Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not…

Dense retrievers utilize pre-trained backbone language models (e.g., BERT, LLaMA) that are fine-tuned via contrastive learning to perform the task of encoding text into sense representations that can be then compared via a shallow…

Information retrieval aims to find information that meets users' needs from the corpus. Different needs correspond to different IR tasks such as document retrieval, open-domain question answering, retrieval-based dialogue, etc., while they…

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking…

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…

As queries in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines powered by large language models (LLMs) become increasingly complex and diverse, dense retrieval models have demonstrated strong performance in semantic matching. Nevertheless,…

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…

The information retrieval community has made significant progress in improving the efficiency of Dual Encoder (DE) dense passage retrieval systems, making them suitable for latency-sensitive settings. However, many proposed procedures are…

While dense retrieval models, which embed queries and documents into a shared low-dimensional space, have gained widespread popularity, they were shown to exhibit important theoretical limitations and considerably lag behind traditional…

Recent dense retrievers increasingly leverage the robust text understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encoding queries and documents into a shared embedding space for effective retrieval. However, most existing methods…

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…

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval research. For decades, lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but it also has inherent defects, such as the vocabulary mismatch problem.…

In modern e-commerce search systems, dense retrieval has become an indispensable component. By computing similarities between query and item (product) embeddings, it efficiently selects candidate products from large-scale repositories. With…

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 involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and…

Efficient document retrieval heavily relies on the technique of semantic hashing, which learns a binary code for every document and employs Hamming distance to evaluate document distances. However, existing semantic hashing methods are…

Information retrieval systems have traditionally relied on exact term match methods such as BM25 for first-stage retrieval. However, recent advancements in neural network-based techniques have introduced a new method called dense retrieval.…