arXiv AI By Aarush Sinha, Rahul Seetharaman, Aman Bansal

ECI: Effective Contrastive Information to Evaluate Hard-Negatives

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arXiv:2603. 20990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hard-negative source selection for dense retrieval is usually decided only after fine-tuning and downstream evaluation.

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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.

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Which Negatives Matter? Ask Your Text Encoder: Adaptive Similarity Margins for Dense-Caption Retrieval

The paper introduces HN-CLIP, a new objective for dense-caption retrieval that adapts similarity margins per negative example using the text encoder’s own geometry. By adding a detached caption‑similarity matrix to the negative logits, HN‑CLIP addresses the issue of near‑duplicate captions that cause premature loss saturation in InfoNCE training. Experiments on four benchmarks show that HN‑CLIP outperforms leading methods by 2.4–4.3 R@1, trains 2.4× faster than GOAL and 5.4× faster than StructXLIP, and achieves the best full‑data baseline with only 20% of the training data.

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