Challenge: Dense retrieval requires discriminative embeddings to represent the semantic relationship between query and document.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised approach that performs unsupervised adaptation of large language models for dense retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on a variety of dense retrieval benchmarks and is available on github.

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Large Language Models as Foundations for Next-Gen Dense Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical Assessment (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have limited generalization capabilities and performance challenges.
Approach: They evaluate 15 different backbone LLMs and non-LLMs to evaluate their performance . larger models and extensive pre-training consistently enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency .
Outcome: The results show that larger models and extensive pre-training enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency.
Making Large Language Models Efficient Dense Retrievers (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning large language models for dense retrieval yields strong performance, but their substantial parameter counts make them computationally inefficient.
Approach: They propose a framework for developing efficient retrievers that performs coarse-to-fine compression through a coarse-grained coarse-tuning strategy.
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Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented large language models excel in various NLP tasks but are not always helpful when the knowledge required is absent in the model.
Approach: They propose to determine whether the model is knowledgeable on a query via inspecting the (contextualized) pre-trained token embeddings of LLMs.
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Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models surpass BERT and T5 on general-purpose text embeddable tasks.
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Language Adaptation of Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on LLaMA2 (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has seen a skyrocketing increase in recent years.
Approach: They present a systematic review of the language adaptation process for Large Language Models including vocabulary expansion, continued pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning.
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Search-Adaptor: Embedding Customization for Information Retrieval (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to embed text in large language models are limited to zero-shot setups and can be integrated with any LLM.
Approach: They propose a method for customizing LLMs for information retrieval by modifying the embeddings generated by pre-trained LLM models and can be integrated with any LLM.
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ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing dense retrieval with query augmentation ignore the alignment between generation and ranking objectives.
Approach: They propose a unified LLM-augmented dense retrieval framework that jointly optimizes both the LLM and the retriever.
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Causal2Vec: Improving Decoder-only LLMs as Embedding Models through a Contextual Token (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods modify attention mechanism to be bidirectional, undermining LLMs’ ability to extract semantic information acquired during pre-training.
Approach: They propose a general-purpose embedding model that pre-encodes input text into a single Contextual token and then prepends it to the LLM's input sequence.
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Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources.
Approach: They propose to integrate task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic by fine-tuning an Amharican instruction fine-to-tuned model.
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Large Language Models are Built-in Autoregressive Search Engines (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing dual-encoder dense retrievers obtain representations for questions and documents independently, allowing only shallow interactions between them.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate URLs for document retrieval by following human instructions.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better retrieval performance than existing retrieval approaches on open-domain question answering benchmarks.

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