Related papers: Towards Dynamic Dense Retrieval with Routing Strat…

Recent advance in Dense Retrieval (DR) techniques has significantly improved the effectiveness of first-stage retrieval. Trained with large-scale supervised data, DR models can encode queries and documents into a low-dimensional dense space…

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using…

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…

Neural models are increasingly used in Web-scale Information Retrieval (IR). However, relying on these models introduces substantial computational and energy requirements, leading to increasing attention toward their environmental cost and…

Dense retrieval (DR) approaches based on powerful pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieved significant advances and have become a key component for modern open-domain question-answering systems. However, they require large amounts of…

Many discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have large label spaces. Learning such a process of large-space decision making is particularly challenging due to the lack of training instances per label and the difficulty of…

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.…

Deploying dense retrieval models efficiently is becoming increasingly important across various industries. This is especially true for enterprise search services, where customizing search engines to meet the time demands of different…

Large Language Model-based Dense Retrieval (LLM-DR) optimizes over numerous heterogeneous fine-tuning collections from different domains. However, the discussion about its training data distribution is still minimal. Previous studies rely…

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…

Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used for sim2real transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in robotics. Most DR approaches require a simulator with a fixed set of tunable parameters from the start of the training, from which…

Various techniques have been developed in recent years to improve dense retrieval (DR), such as unsupervised contrastive learning and pseudo-query generation. Existing DRs, however, often suffer from effectiveness tradeoffs between…

Function calling agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) select external tools to automate complex tasks. On-device agents typically use a retrieval module to select relevant tools, improving performance and reducing context length.…

Generative Retrieval (GR), autoregressively decoding relevant document identifiers given a query, has been shown to perform well under the setting of small-scale corpora. By memorizing the document corpus with model parameters, GR…

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the…

We propose the new problem of choosing which dense retrieval model to use when searching on a new collection for which no labels are available, i.e. in a zero-shot setting. Many dense retrieval models are readily available. Each model…

Many challenging real-world problems require the deployment of ensembles multiple complementary learning models to reach acceptable performance levels. While effective, applying the entire ensemble to every sample is costly and often…

The vast majority of Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques rely on second-order statistics to define their optimization objective. Even though this provides adequate results in most cases, it comes with several shortcomings. The methods…

Long-tail question answering presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to their limited ability to acquire and accurately recall less common knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have shown great…

Soft robots are gaining popularity thanks to their intrinsic safety to contacts and adaptability. However, the potentially infinite number of Degrees of Freedom makes their modeling a daunting task, and in many cases only an approximated…