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In information retrieval (IR), domain adaptation is the process of adapting a retrieval model to a new domain whose data distribution is different from the source domain. Existing methods in this area focus on unsupervised domain adaptation…
Recent work has shown that small distilled language models are strong competitors to models that are orders of magnitude larger and slower in a wide range of information retrieval tasks. This has made distilled and dense models, due to…
Few-shot dense retrieval (DR) aims to effectively generalize to novel search scenarios by learning a few samples. Despite its importance, there is little study on specialized datasets and standardized evaluation protocols. As a result,…
We propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open question answering. The re-ranker re-scores retrieved passages with a zero-shot question generation model, which uses a pre-trained language model…
Unsupervised binary representation allows fast data retrieval without any annotations, enabling practical application like fast person re-identification and multimedia retrieval. It is argued that conflicts in binary space are one of the…
Although existing neural retrieval models reveal promising results when training data is abundant and the performance keeps improving as training data increases, collecting high-quality annotated data is prohibitively costly. To this end,…
Despite the advantages of their low-resource settings, traditional sparse retrievers depend on exact matching approaches between high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representations of both the queries and the collection. As a result,…
The zero-shot effectiveness of neural retrieval models is often evaluated on the BEIR benchmark -- a combination of different IR evaluation datasets. Interestingly, previous studies found that particularly on the BEIR subset Touch\'e 2020,…
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…
Dense retrieval overcome the lexical gap and has shown great success in ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Despite their success, dense retrievers are expensive to serve across practical use cases. For use cases requiring to search from…
Dense retrieval (DR) methods conduct text retrieval by first encoding texts in the embedding space and then matching them by nearest neighbor search. This requires strong locality properties from the representation space, i.e, the close…
In dense retrieval, effective training hinges on selecting high quality hard negatives while avoiding false negatives. Recent methods apply heuristics based on positive document scores to identify hard negatives, improving both performance…
Dense retrievers have demonstrated significant potential for neural information retrieval; however, they exhibit a lack of robustness to domain shifts, thereby limiting their efficacy in zero-shot settings across diverse domains. A…
We present a new zero-shot dense retrieval (ZeroDR) method, COCO-DR, to improve the generalization ability of dense retrieval by combating the distribution shifts between source training tasks and target scenarios. To mitigate the impact of…
Dense retrieval approaches can overcome the lexical gap and lead to significantly improved search results. However, they require large amounts of training data which is not available for most domains. As shown in previous work (Thakur et…
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.…
This paper presents a novel way of online adapting any off-the-shelf object detection model to a novel domain without retraining the detector model. Inspired by how humans quickly learn knowledge of a new subject (e.g., memorization), we…
Pre-trained Language Models have recently emerged in Information Retrieval as providing the backbone of a new generation of neural systems that outperform traditional methods on a variety of tasks. However, it is still unclear to what…
Foundation vision-language models have enabled remarkable zero-shot transferability of the pre-trained representations to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, to solve a new task, zero-shot transfer still necessitates human guidance…
Dense retrievers play a vital role in accessing external and specialized knowledge to augment language models (LMs). Training dense retrievers typically requires annotated query-document pairs, which are costly to create and scarce in…