arXiv AI By Zucan Lyu, Rui Tang, Jianlyu Chen, Peisheng Jin, Zheng Liu, Defu Lian

Self-improving data synthesis can scale embedding models across domains and tasks

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arXiv AI
Oct 16

Self-improving data synthesis enables scalable adaptation of embedding models

The paper introduces SYNTRA, a self‑improving framework that transforms a small set of retrieval examples into reusable synthesis instructions for generating training data. By inferring implicit information needs and relevance criteria from an unlabelled corpus and refining instructions through feedback, SYNTRA produces effective training data across 24 datasets and 15 domains, improving retrieval performance even for strong embedding models. Experiments show that SYNTRA’s self‑improvement yields better results than human calibration on four tasks and scales effectively, with continued gains on MS MARCO across a 32‑fold range of synthetic data sizes.

By Zucan Lyu, Rui Tang, Jianlyu Chen, Peisheng Jin, Defu Lian
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 Machine Learning
Oct 3

Retrieval from Within: An Intrinsic Capability of Attention-Based Models

The paper introduces INTRA, an attention-based encoder-decoder framework that retrieves directly from its own internal representations instead of using an external retriever. By having decoder attention query pre-encoded evidence chunks, INTRA unifies retrieval and generation, eliminating the typical mismatch seen in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that INTRA outperforms strong engineered retrieval pipelines in both evidence recall and overall answer quality.

By Elad Hoffer, Yochai Blau, Edan Kinderman, Ron Banner, Daniel Soudry, Boris Ginsburg