Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional retrieval methods such as BM25 and Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) excel at capturing lexical and semantic relevance but fall short in addressing time-sensitive queries. To bridge this gap, we introduce the temporal retrieval model that integrates explicit temporal signals by incorporating query timestamps and document dates into the representation space. Our approach ensures that retrieved passages are not only topically relevant but also temporally aligned with user intent. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale benchmark datasets, ArchivalQA and ChroniclingAmericaQA, achieving substantial performance gains over standard retrieval baselines. In particular, our model improves Top-1 retrieval accuracy by 6.63% and NDCG@10 by 3.79% on ArchivalQA, while yielding a 9.56% boost in Top-1 retrieval accuracy and 4.68% in NDCG@10 on ChroniclingAmericaQA. Additionally, we introduce a time-sensitive negative sampling strategy, which refines the model's ability to distinguish between temporally relevant and irrelevant documents during training. Our findings highlight the importance of explicitly modeling time in retrieval systems and set a new standard for handling temporally grounded queries.

This study addresses the hallucination problem in large language models (LLMs). We adopted Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) (Lewis et al., 2020), a technique that involves embedding relevant information in the prompt to obtain accurate answers. However, RAG also faced inherent issues in retrieving correct information. To address this, we employed the Dense Passage Retrieval(DPR) (Karpukhin et al., 2020) model for fetching domain-specific documents related to user queries. Despite this, the DPR model still lacked accuracy in document retrieval. We enhanced the DPR model by incorporating control tokens, achieving significantly superior performance over the standard DPR model, with a 13% improvement in Top-1 accuracy and a 4% improvement in Top-20 accuracy.

Masked auto-encoder pre-training has emerged as a prevalent technique for initializing and enhancing dense retrieval systems. It generally utilizes additional Transformer decoder blocks to provide sustainable supervision signals and compress contextual information into dense representations. However, the underlying reasons for the effectiveness of such a pre-training technique remain unclear. The usage of additional Transformer-based decoders also incurs significant computational costs. In this study, we aim to shed light on this issue by revealing that masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training with enhanced decoding significantly improves the term coverage of input tokens in dense representations, compared to vanilla BERT checkpoints. Building upon this observation, we propose a modification to the traditional MAE by replacing the decoder of a masked auto-encoder with a completely simplified Bag-of-Word prediction task. This modification enables the efficient compression of lexical signals into dense representations through unsupervised pre-training. Remarkably, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance on several large-scale retrieval benchmarks without requiring any additional parameters, which provides a 67% training speed-up compared to standard masked auto-encoder pre-training with enhanced decoding.

Recently, methods have been developed to improve the performance of dense passage retrieval by using context-supervised pre-training. These methods simply consider two passages from the same document to be relevant, without taking into account the possibility of weakly correlated pairs. Thus, this paper proposes query-as-context pre-training, a simple yet effective pre-training technique to alleviate the issue. Query-as-context pre-training assumes that the query derived from a passage is more likely to be relevant to that passage and forms a passage-query pair. These passage-query pairs are then used in contrastive or generative context-supervised pre-training. The pre-trained models are evaluated on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks and out-of-domain zero-shot benchmarks. Experimental results show that query-as-context pre-training brings considerable gains and meanwhile speeds up training, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/caskcsg/ir/tree/main/cotmae-qc .

Prompt-based learning's efficacy across numerous natural language processing tasks has led to its integration into dense passage retrieval. Prior research has mainly focused on enhancing the semantic understanding of pre-trained language models by optimizing a single vector as a continuous prompt. This approach, however, leads to a semantic space collapse; identical semantic information seeps into all representations, causing their distributions to converge in a restricted region. This hinders differentiation between relevant and irrelevant passages during dense retrieval. To tackle this issue, we present Topic-DPR, a dense passage retrieval model that uses topic-based prompts. Unlike the single prompt method, multiple topic-based prompts are established over a probabilistic simplex and optimized simultaneously through contrastive learning. This encourages representations to align with their topic distributions, improving space uniformity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel positive and negative sampling strategy, leveraging semi-structured data to boost dense retrieval efficiency. Experimental results from two datasets affirm that our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art retrieval techniques.

In this paper, we systematically study the potential of pre-training with Large Language Model(LLM)-based document expansion for dense passage retrieval. Concretely, we leverage the capabilities of LLMs for document expansion, i.e. query generation, and effectively transfer expanded knowledge to retrievers using pre-training strategies tailored for passage retrieval. These strategies include contrastive learning and bottlenecked query generation. Furthermore, we incorporate a curriculum learning strategy to reduce the reliance on LLM inferences. Experimental results demonstrate that pre-training with LLM-based document expansion significantly boosts the retrieval performance on large-scale web-search tasks. Our work shows strong zero-shot and out-of-domain retrieval abilities, making it more widely applicable for retrieval when initializing with no human-labeled data.

Pre-trained Transformers (e.g., BERT) have been commonly used in existing dense retrieval methods for parameter initialization, and recent studies are exploring more effective pre-training tasks for further improving the quality of dense vectors. Although various novel and effective tasks have been proposed, their different input formats and learning objectives make them hard to be integrated for jointly improving the model performance. In this work, we aim to unify a variety of pre-training tasks into the bottlenecked masked autoencoder manner, and integrate them into a multi-task pre-trained model, namely MASTER. Concretely, MASTER utilizes a shared-encoder multi-decoder architecture that can construct a representation bottleneck to compress the abundant semantic information across tasks into dense vectors. Based on it, we integrate three types of representative pre-training tasks: corrupted passages recovering, related passages recovering and PLMs outputs recovering, to characterize the inner-passage information, inter-passage relations and PLMs knowledge. Extensive experiments have shown that our approach outperforms competitive dense retrieval methods.

Recently, various studies have been directed towards exploring dense passage retrieval techniques employing pre-trained language models, among which the masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training architecture has emerged as the most promising. The conventional MAE framework relies on leveraging the passage reconstruction of decoder to bolster the text representation ability of encoder, thereby enhancing the performance of resulting dense retrieval systems. Within the context of building the representation ability of the encoder through passage reconstruction of decoder, it is reasonable to postulate that a ``more demanding'' decoder will necessitate a corresponding increase in the encoder's ability. To this end, we propose a novel token importance aware masking strategy based on pointwise mutual information to intensify the challenge of the decoder. Importantly, our approach can be implemented in an unsupervised manner, without adding additional expenses to the pre-training phase. Our experiments verify that the proposed method is both effective and robust on large-scale supervised passage retrieval datasets and out-of-domain zero-shot retrieval benchmarks.

In various natural language processing tasks, passage retrieval and passage re-ranking are two key procedures in finding and ranking relevant information. Since both the two procedures contribute to the final performance, it is important to jointly optimize them in order to achieve mutual improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel joint training approach for dense passage retrieval and passage re-ranking. A major contribution is that we introduce the dynamic listwise distillation, where we design a unified listwise training approach for both the retriever and the re-ranker. During the dynamic distillation, the retriever and the re-ranker can be adaptively improved according to each other's relevance information. We also propose a hybrid data augmentation strategy to construct diverse training instances for listwise training approach. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/RocketQA.

Pre-trained language model (PTM) has been shown to yield powerful text representations for dense passage retrieval task. The Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is a major sub-task of the pre-training process. However, we found that the conventional random masking strategy tend to select a large number of tokens that have limited effect on the passage retrieval task (e,g. stop-words and punctuation). By noticing the term importance weight can provide valuable information for passage retrieval, we hereby propose alternative retrieval oriented masking (dubbed as ROM) strategy where more important tokens will have a higher probability of being masked out, to capture this straightforward yet essential information to facilitate the language model pre-training process. Notably, the proposed new token masking method will not change the architecture and learning objective of original PTM. Our experiments verify that the proposed ROM enables term importance information to help language model pre-training thus achieving better performance on multiple passage retrieval benchmarks.