Related papers: PairDistill: Pairwise Relevance Distillation for D…

Recent work in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has shown the benefit of the Translate-Distill framework that trains a cross-language neural dual-encoder model using…

Training effective text rerankers is crucial for information retrieval. Two strategies are widely used: contrastive learning (optimizing directly on ground-truth labels) and knowledge distillation (transferring knowledge from a larger…

Knowledge distillation is an effective method to improve the performance of a lightweight neural network (i.e., student model) by transferring the knowledge of a well-performed neural network (i.e., teacher model), which has been widely…

We introduce and define the novel problem of multi-distribution information retrieval (IR) where given a query, systems need to retrieve passages from within multiple collections, each drawn from a different distribution. Some of these…

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…

The task of Information Retrieval (IR) requires a system to identify relevant documents based on users' information needs. In real-world scenarios, retrievers are expected to not only rely on the semantic relevance between the documents and…

Information retrieval (IR) or knowledge retrieval, is a critical component for many down-stream tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA). It is also very challenging, as it requires succinctness, completeness, and correctness. In…

Large neural models (such as Transformers) achieve state-of-the-art performance for information retrieval (IR). In this paper, we aim to improve distillation methods that pave the way for the resource-efficient deployment of such models in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed listwise document reranking by enabling global reasoning over candidate sets, yet single models often struggle to balance fine-grained relevance scoring with holistic cross-document analysis. We…

Conversational Search (CS) involves retrieving relevant documents from a corpus while considering the conversational context, integrating retrieval with context modeling. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have…

The reranker and generator are two critical components in the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (i.e., RAG) pipeline, responsible for ranking relevant documents and generating responses. However, due to differences in pre-training data and…

Neural networks with deep architectures have demonstrated significant performance improvements in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. The challenges in information retrieval (IR), however, are different…

Reranking documents based on their relevance to a given query is a critical task in information retrieval. Traditional reranking methods often lack transparency and rely on proprietary models, hindering reproducibility and interpretability.…

Recent research has explored distilling knowledge from large language models (LLMs) to optimize retriever models, especially within the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework. However, most existing training methods rely on…

Retrieval-augmented generation has achieved strong performance on knowledge-intensive tasks where query-document relevance can be identified through direct lexical or semantic matches. However, many real-world queries involve abstract…

A thorough comprehension of image content demands a complex grasp of the interactions that may occur in the natural world. One of the key issues is to describe the visual relationships between objects. When dealing with real world data,…

Efficiently retrieving a concise set of candidates from a large document corpus remains a pivotal challenge in Information Retrieval (IR). Neural retrieval models, particularly dense retrieval models built with transformers and pretrained…

Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities…

The evaluation of Information Retrieval (IR) systems typically uses query-document pairs with corresponding human-labelled relevance assessments (qrels). These qrels are used to determine if one system is better than another based on…

Due to the high storage and search efficiency, hashing has become prevalent for large-scale similarity search. Particularly, deep hashing methods have greatly improved the search performance under supervised scenarios. In contrast,…