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Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval

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arxiv 2108.05540 v1 pith:4YY5ZULT submitted 2021-08-12 cs.IR cs.CL

classification cs.IRcs.CL
keywords densepre-trainingretrievalbatchcocondenserdataembeddingengineered
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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 potential. In this paper, we identify and address two underlying problems of dense retrievers: i)~fragility to training data noise and ii)~requiring large batches to robustly learn the embedding space. We use the recently proposed Condenser pre-training architecture, which learns to condense information into the dense vector through LM pre-training. On top of it, we propose coCondenser, which adds an unsupervised corpus-level contrastive loss to warm up the passage embedding space. Retrieval experiments on MS-MARCO, Natural Question, and Trivia QA datasets show that coCondenser removes the need for heavy data engineering such as augmentation, synthesis, or filtering, as well as the need for large batch training. It shows comparable performance to RocketQA, a state-of-the-art, heavily engineered system, using simple small batch fine-tuning.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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  3. HyReC: Exploring Hybrid-based Retriever for Chinese

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    HyReC unifies dense, lexicon, and learned word-segment retrieval into one model and reports improved C-MTEB retrieval scores for Chinese.

  4. A Comparative Study of Specialized LLMs as Dense Retrievers

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    Specialized Qwen2.5 7B models differ in dense retrieval quality: math and long-reasoning variants degrade performance, while coder and vision-language variants improve zero-shot text and code retrieval.

  5. GOLFer: Smaller LM-Generated Documents Hallucination Filter & Combiner for Query Expansion in Information Retrieval

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    GOLFer filters hallucinated sentences from small-LM-generated hypothetical documents and reweights the rest into the query, improving retrieval at lower cost than large LLM expansion.

  6. Exp4Fuse: A Rank Fusion Framework for Enhanced Sparse Retrieval using Large Language Model-based Query Expansion

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    Exp4Fuse improves sparse retrieval by fusing the ranked lists from the original query and an LLM-expanded query using a modified reciprocal rank fusion.

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