CA-HNM: Constraint-Aware Hard Negative Mining for Dense Retrieval with Structured Domain Models
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The paper introduces Natural Hard-Negative Mining (NHNM) for instruction‑following information retrieval, a method that turns original positive passages into hard negatives under query‑compatible instructions. NHNM uses a pipeline of Candidate Cleaning, Reversal Construction, and Geometry Filtering to generate a compact, high‑contrast training set called NHNM‑MARCO with nearly 7,000 instances. Models fine‑tuned on NHNM‑MARCO, ranging from 568 M to 4 B parameters, achieve strong instruction‑following performance on InstructIR and FollowIR, matching or exceeding larger retrievers and demonstrating that the gains stem from natural hard‑negative supervision rather than model size or data volume.
arXiv:2606. 01304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hard negative mining has become the dominant strategy for training retrievers, yet it faces intrinsic limitations: negatives are bounded by corpus availability, selected by retriever score rather than diagnostic value, and increasingly contaminated by false positives as the retriever improves.
The paper investigates modular entity disambiguation by separating candidate retrieval from entity selection. It compares sparse retrieval (BM25), Web KB search, and a dense retriever, all paired with large language model selectors. Results show that a training‑free BM25 retriever combined with an LLM selector achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the ZELDA benchmark, and the modular approach enables abstention when retrieval fails.
arXiv:2609.22227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative retrieval represents each item by a short Semantic ID and casts recommendation as autoregressive generation of that sequence. Because the...
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.
arXiv:2603. 20990v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hard-negative source selection for dense retrieval is usually decided only after fine-tuning and downstream evaluation.