Related papers: DeeperImpact: Optimizing Sparse Learned Index Stru…
Neural information retrieval systems typically use a cascading pipeline, in which a first-stage model retrieves a candidate set of documents and one or more subsequent stages re-rank this set using contextualized language models such as…
Neural information retrieval architectures based on transformers such as BERT are able to significantly improve system effectiveness over traditional sparse models such as BM25. Though highly effective, these neural approaches are very…
In neural Information Retrieval (IR), ongoing research is directed towards improving the first retriever in ranking pipelines. Learning dense embeddings to conduct retrieval using efficient approximate nearest neighbors methods has proven…
Sparse neural retrievers, such as DeepImpact, uniCOIL and SPLADE, have been introduced recently as an efficient and effective way to perform retrieval with inverted indexes. They aim to learn term importance and, in some cases, document…
Neural retrievers based on dense representations combined with Approximate Nearest Neighbors search have recently received a lot of attention, owing their success to distillation and/or better sampling of examples for training -- while…
Text retrieval using learned sparse representations of queries and documents has, over the years, evolved into a highly effective approach to search. It is thanks to recent advances in approximate nearest neighbor search-with the emergence…
We explore leveraging corpus-specific vocabularies that improve both efficiency and effectiveness of learned sparse retrieval systems. We find that pre-training the underlying BERT model on the target corpus, specifically targeting…
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…
Sparse document representations have been widely used to retrieve relevant documents via exact lexical matching. Owing to the pre-computed inverted index, it supports fast ad-hoc search but incurs the vocabulary mismatch problem. Although…
Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models have achieved impressive performance on multimodal tasks, including text-image retrieval, based on dense representations. Meanwhile, Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) has gained traction in text-only…
In neural Information Retrieval, ongoing research is directed towards improving the first retriever in ranking pipelines. Learning dense embeddings to conduct retrieval using efficient approximate nearest neighbors methods has proven to…
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,…
Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) such as SPLADE has growing interest for effective semantic 1st stage matching while enjoying the efficiency of inverted indices. A recent work on learning SPLADE models with expanded vocabularies (ESPLADE) was…
The late interaction paradigm introduced with ColBERT stands out in the neural Information Retrieval space, offering a compelling effectiveness-efficiency trade-off across many benchmarks. Efficient late interaction retrieval is based on an…
Traditional information retrieval is based on sparse bag-of-words vector representations of documents and queries. More recent deep-learning approaches have used dense embeddings learned using a transformer-based large language model. We…
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.…
Learned sparse retrieval, which can efficiently perform retrieval through mature inverted-index engines, has garnered growing attention in recent years. Particularly, the inference-free sparse retrievers are attractive as they eliminate…
Expansion-enhanced sparse lexical representation improves information retrieval (IR) by minimizing vocabulary mismatch problems during lexical matching. In this paper, we explore the potential of jointly learning dense semantic…
Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and…
Learned sparse representations form an attractive class of contextual embeddings for text retrieval. That is so because they are effective models of relevance and are interpretable by design. Despite their apparent compatibility with…