Related papers: Is Position Bias in Dense Retrievers Built In-or L…

Training data attribution (TDA) techniques find influential training data for the model's prediction on the test data of interest. They approximate the impact of down- or up-weighting a particular training sample. While conceptually useful,…

In inductive transfer learning, fine-tuning pre-trained convolutional networks substantially outperforms training from scratch. When using fine-tuning, the underlying assumption is that the pre-trained model extracts generic features, which…

Many types of data from fields including natural language processing, computer vision, and bioinformatics, are well represented by discrete, compositional structures such as trees, sequences, or matchings. Latent structure models are a…

Dense retrieval has become the new paradigm in passage retrieval. Despite its effectiveness on typo-free queries, it is not robust when dealing with queries that contain typos. Current works on improving the typo-robustness of dense…

We study a repeated information design setting in which the receiver, who is also the decision-maker, updates beliefs in a systematically biased way. More specifically, a distorted posterior in our model can be written as a convex…

Sparse annotation poses persistent challenges to training dense retrieval models; for example, it distorts the training signal when unlabeled relevant documents are used spuriously as negatives in contrastive learning. To alleviate this…

The recent advancement in language representation modeling has broadly affected the design of dense retrieval models. In particular, many of the high-performing dense retrieval models evaluate representations of query and document using…

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) can enhance average retrieval effectiveness over a sufficiently large number of queries. However, PRF often introduces a drift into the original information need, thus hurting the retrieval effectiveness of…

Given the increasing scale of model sizes, novel training strategies like gradual stacking [Gong et al., 2019, Reddi et al., 2023] have garnered interest. Stacking enables efficient training by gradually growing the depth of a model in…

We consider text retrieval within dense representational space in real-world settings such as e-commerce search where (a) document popularity and (b) diversity of queries associated with a document have a skewed distribution. Most of the…

Societal biases that are contained in retrieved documents have received increased interest. Such biases, which are often prevalent in the training data and learned by the model, can cause societal harms, by misrepresenting certain groups,…

Natural data are often long-tail distributed over semantic classes. Existing recognition methods tackle this imbalanced classification by placing more emphasis on the tail data, through class re-balancing/re-weighting or ensembling over…

Biased attributes, spuriously correlated with target labels in a dataset, can problematically lead to neural networks that learn improper shortcuts for classifications and limit their capabilities for out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Deep learning is increasingly moving towards a transfer learning paradigm whereby large foundation models are fine-tuned on downstream tasks, starting from an initialization learned on the source task. But an initialization contains…

Owing to their remarkable learning (and relearning) capabilities, deep neural networks (DNNs) find use in numerous real-world applications. However, the learning of these data-driven machine learning models is generally as good as the data…

Dense retrieval models use bi-encoder network architectures for learning query and document representations. These representations are often in the form of a vector representation and their similarities are often computed using the dot…

Machine learning methods adapt the parameters of a model, constrained to lie in a given model class, by using a fixed learning procedure based on data or active observations. Adaptation is done on a per-task basis, and retraining is needed…

Modern knowledge-intensive systems, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), rely on effective retrievers to establish the performance ceiling for downstream modules. However, retriever training has been bottlenecked by sparse,…

Recent studies on pre-trained vision/language models have demonstrated the practical benefit of a new, promising solution-building paradigm in AI where models can be pre-trained on broad data describing a generic task space and then adapted…

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…