Related papers: GASLITEing the Retrieval: Exploring Vulnerabilitie…

Recent advances in federated learning have demonstrated its promising capability to learn on decentralized datasets. However, a considerable amount of work has raised concerns due to the potential risks of adversaries participating in the…

Adversarial attacks are carried out to reveal the vulnerability of deep neural networks. Textual adversarial attacking is challenging because text is discrete and a small perturbation can bring significant change to the original input.…

Generative retrieval is a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that generates identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target. This paradigm leverages powerful generative language models, distinct from traditional sparse…

The proliferation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has established vector databases as critical infrastructure, yet they introduce severe privacy risks via embedding inversion attacks. Existing paradigms face a fundamental trade-off:…

Neural text ranking models have witnessed significant advancement and are increasingly being deployed in practice. Unfortunately, they also inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural models, which have been detected but remain…

At CCS 2015 Naveed et al. presented first attacks on efficiently searchable encryption, such as deterministic and order-preserving encryption. These plaintext guessing attacks have been further improved in subsequent work, e.g. by Grubbs et…

Over the past few years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been continuously expanding their real-world applications for source code processing tasks across the software engineering domain, e.g., clone detection, code search, comment…

In embedding-based retrieval, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search enables efficient retrieval of similar items from large-scale datasets. While maximizing recall of relevant items is usually the goal of retrieval systems, a low…

The widespread adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in real-world applications has heightened concerns about the confidentiality and integrity of their proprietary knowledge bases. These knowledge bases, which play a…

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…

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Among different attack settings, the most challenging yet the most practical one is the hard-label setting where the attacker only has access to the hard-label output (prediction…

LLMs have fundamentally transformed dense retrieval, upgrading backbones from discriminative encoders to generative architectures. However, a critical disconnect remains: while LLMs possess strong reasoning capabilities, current retrievers…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are essential to contemporary AI applications, allowing large language models to obtain external knowledge via vector similarity search. Nevertheless, these systems encounter a significant…

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…

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…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to produce evidence-based responses, and its performance hinges on the matching between the retriever and LLMs. Retriever optimization has emerged as an efficient…

Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) utilises the relevance signals from the top-k passages from the first round of retrieval to perform a second round of retrieval aiming to improve search effectiveness. A recent research direction has been the…

Large language models (LLMs) inherently display hallucinations since the precision of generated texts cannot be guaranteed purely by the parametric knowledge they include. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhance the…

We investigate improving the retrieval effectiveness of embedding models through the lens of corpus-specific fine-tuning. Prior work has shown that fine-tuning with queries generated using a dataset's retrieval corpus can boost retrieval…

Despite recent advances, Large Language Models (LLMs) still generate vulnerable code. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has the potential to enhance LLMs for secure code generation by incorporating external security knowledge. However,…