arXiv AI

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

arXiv:2606. 17910v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.

By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Align Then Adapt: Label-Efficient Adapter Learning for Asymmetric Dense Retrieval

The paper introduces Efficient Retrieval Adapter (ERA), a query‑side adapter framework that enables dense retrieval systems to adapt to asymmetric query–document scenarios without re‑indexing. ERA first aligns the embedding spaces of a powerful query embedder and a lightweight document embedder using unlabeled documents, then fine‑tunes the aligned query representation with a small set of labeled query‑document pairs. In experiments on 126 MAIR retrieval tasks across six domains, ERA boosts average nDCG@10 by up to 8.2 points in symmetric settings and over 12 points in asymmetric settings while requiring far fewer labels than fully supervised adapter training.

By Seiji Maekawa, Moin Aminnaseri, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Estevam Hruschka
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

VIBE: Vector Index Benchmark for Embeddings

arXiv:2505. 17810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is a performance-critical component of many machine learning pipelines, and rigorous benchmarking is essential for assessing the performance of vector indexes for ANN search.

By Elias J\"a\"asaari, Ville Hyv\"onen, Matteo Ceccarello, Teemu Roos, Martin Aum\"uller
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

KaLM-Reranker-V1: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking

arXiv:2606.22807v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As retrieval systems scale, effective and efficient reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing encoder- and decoder-based rer...

By Xinping Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Ziqi Dai, Xin Zhang, Huiyao Chen, Shouzheng Huang, Xianhao Xiong, Danyu Tang, Xinshuo Hu, Guohong Fu, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

arXiv:2604. 23336v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs.

By Teng Chen, Sheng Xu, Feixiang Guo, Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

E2Rank: Unifying Text Embedding and Listwise Reranking for Effective and Efficient Search

E2Rank (Efficient Embedding-based Ranking) is a unified framework that extends a single text embedding model to perform both retrieval and listwise reranking. By treating the listwise prompt—constructed from the query and its top‑K candidates—as a pseudo‑relevance feedback query, E2Rank reranks via cosine similarity against precomputed document embeddings, avoiding costly autoregressive decoding. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on BEIR, competitive performance on the reasoning‑intensive BRIGHT benchmark, lower latency than existing LLM‑based rerankers, and improved embedding performance on MTEB—all within a single model.

By Qi Liu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Jiaxin Mao
arXiv AI
Sep 1

E-SENS: Exclusion-Sensitive Penalization for Negative-Constraint Retrieval

E‑SENS is a training‑free reranking technique designed to improve negative‑constraint retrieval in retrieval‑augmented language models. It works by extracting a compact ‘trap query’ that represents the excluded concept and subtracting the similarity of this trap query from the original retrieval score, thereby reducing the influence of documents that mention the excluded concept. Experiments on the ExcluIR benchmark demonstrate that E‑SENS achieves a clear recall‑violation trade‑off across four embedding models and effectively reduces trap retrieval while preserving recall.

By Yerang Kim, Jiyoon Myung, Joohyung Han