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Prompted embedding models have recently received increasing attention, particularly for retrieval, where detailed retrieval instructions are provided as part of the retrieval prompt. Several new datas...
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.
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.
The paper introduces the AutoRegressive Retriever (ARR), a multimodal retrieval model that iteratively refines a query embedding by selecting informative items and incorporating their content. ARR alternates between retrieval and query update, using stepwise contrastive supervision and reinforcement learning to optimize item selection and final ranking. Experiments show ARR outperforms baselines on in‑domain and zero‑shot benchmarks, with feedback improving both inference performance and initial query embeddings.
arXiv:2610.07731v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrieval models are typically trained with contrastive objectives that learn effective representations but do not directly optimize retrieval...
As retrieval systems scale, high-quality reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing rerankers, whether encoder-based or decoder-based, jointly encode the query and passage, tightly coupling their computation and limiting deployment efficiency as well as flexibility.