Related papers: Offline Pseudo Relevance Feedback for Efficient an…

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) is an effective IR approach that exploits pre-trained language models for encoding text into a learned bag of words. Several efforts in the literature have shown that sparsity is key to enabling a good…

Training and refreshing a web-scale Question Answering (QA) system for a multi-lingual commercial search engine often requires a huge amount of training examples. One principled idea is to mine implicit relevance feedback from user behavior…

Extracting query-document relevance from the sparse, biased clickthrough log is among the most fundamental tasks in the web search system. Prior art mainly learns a relevance judgment model with semantic features of the query and document…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

In open-domain question answering, a model receives a text question as input and searches for the correct answer using a large evidence corpus. The retrieval step is especially difficult as typical evidence corpora have \textit{millions} of…

Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense…

A delayed feedback reservoir (DFR) is a reservoir computing system well-suited for hardware implementations. However, achieving high accuracy in DFRs depends heavily on selecting appropriate hyperparameters. Conventionally, due to the…

Unlike the Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) setting, the conversational (ODConvQA) domain has received limited attention when it comes to reevaluating baselines for both efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we study the…

Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) is a popular method for first-stage retrieval because it combines the semantic matching of language models with efficient CPU-friendly algorithms. Previous work aggregates blocks into "superblocks" to quickly…

Modern large-scale recommender systems employ multi-stage ranking funnel (Retrieval, Pre-ranking, Ranking) to balance engagement and computational constraints (latency, CPU). However, the initial retrieval stage, often relying on efficient…

Retrieval-augmented language models have exhibited promising performance across various areas of natural language processing (NLP), including fact-critical tasks. However, due to the black-box nature of advanced large language models (LLMs)…

Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown remarkable success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Traditional RLHF methods rely on a fixed dataset, which often suffers from limited coverage. To…

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the…

This article evaluates the performance of two techniques for query reformulation in a system for information retrieval, namely, the concept based and the pseudo relevance feedback reformulation. The experiments performed on a corpus of…

Vector-based retrieval systems have become a common staple for academic and industrial search applications because they provide a simple and scalable way of extending the search to leverage contextual representations for documents and…

In this paper, we investigate the use of small datasets in the context of offline reinforcement learning (RL). While many common offline RL benchmarks employ datasets with over a million data points, many offline RL applications rely on…

Intuitively, an ideal collaborative filtering (CF) model should learn from users' full rankings over all items to make optimal top-K recommendations. Due to the absence of such full rankings in practice, most CF models rely on pairwise loss…

The past few years have witnessed a growing interest in LLM-based recommender systems (RSs), although their industrial deployment remains in a preliminary stage. Most existing deployments leverage LLMs offline as feature enhancers,…

Web search provides a promising way for people to obtain information and has been extensively studied. With the surgence of deep learning and large-scale pre-training techniques, various neural information retrieval models are proposed and…