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Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since gold evidence is not always available, and QA is fundamentally different from IR. We show for the first time that it is possible to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. In this setting, evidence retrieval from all of Wikipedia is treated as a latent variable. Since this is impractical to learn from scratch, we pre-train the retriever with an Inverse Cloze Task. We evaluate on open versions of five QA datasets. On datasets where the questioner already knows the answer, a traditional IR system such as BM25 is sufficient. On datasets where a user is genuinely seeking an answer, we show that learned retrieval is crucial, outperforming BM25 by up to 19 points in exact match.

representative citing papers

R2MED: A Benchmark for Reasoning-Driven Medical Retrieval

cs.IR · 2025-05-20 · accept · novelty 6.0

R2MED is the first benchmark for reasoning-driven medical retrieval, where even top models reach only 41.4 nDCG@10 on queries requiring inference beyond lexical or semantic overlap.

An Empirical Study of Mamba-based Language Models

cs.LG · 2024-06-12 · accept · novelty 6.0

An 8B Mamba-2-Hybrid with 43% Mamba-2, 7% attention, and 50% MLP layers exceeds an 8B Transformer by 2.65 points on average across 12 tasks and matches it on 23 long-context tasks while enabling up to 8x faster inference.

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