Papers with Dense retrieval
Thesis Proposal: On the Granularity-Robustness Trade-off in Text-Derived Knowledge Graphs (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on dense embeddings is a dominant paradigm for text retrieval, but many real-world applications require attribute-specific querying. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven framework for constructing and retrieving knowledge graphs from text using dense embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines the robustness of dense retrieval with the explicit queryability of symbolic representations. |
Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval require large supervised datasets with custom hard-negative mining and denoising of positive examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require labeled training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses strong supervised performance levels on multiple QA benchmarks with no labeled training data or task-specific losses. |
Typo-Robust Representation Learning for Dense Retrieval (2023.acl-short)
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Panuthep Tasawong, Wuttikorn Ponwitayarat, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
| Challenge: | Dense retrieval is a fundamental building block of information retrieval applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns misspelled queries with their pristine counterparts to improve contrast between each query and its surrounding queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the competitors in all cases with misspelled queries. |
BoolQuestions: Does Dense Retrieval Understand Boolean Logic in Language? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval systems focus on optimizing text embedding space while overlooking Boolean logic in language. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate whether retrieval systems can comprehend Boolean logic in language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset covering complex queries containing basic Boolean logic and corresponding annotated passages. |
Llama2Vec: Unsupervised Adaptation of Large Language Models for Dense Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Less is More: Pretrain a Strong Siamese Encoder for Dense Text Retrieval Using a Weak Decoder (2021.emnlp-main)
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Shuqi Lu, Di He, Chenyan Xiong, Guolin Ke, Waleed Malik, Zhicheng Dou, Paul Bennett, Tie-Yan Liu, Arnold Overwijk
| Challenge: | Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning method that pre-trains the autoencoder using a weak decoder to push the encoder to provide better sequence representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts the effectiveness and few-shot ability of dense retrieval models on web search, news recommendation, and open domain question answering. |
Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval (DR) methods first encode texts into a dense embedding space and then conduct text retrieval using efficient nearest neighbor search. |
| Approach: | They propose Momentum adversarial Domain Invariant Representation learning to train a domain classifier that distinguishes source versus target domains and adversarially updates the DR encoder to learn domain invariant representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on 10+ ranking datasets collected in the BEIR benchmark in the zero-shot setting, with more than 10% relative gains on datasets with enough sensitivity for DR models’ evaluation. |
BERM: Training the Balanced and Extractable Representation for Matching to Improve Generalization Ability of Dense Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval has shown promise in the first-stage retrieval process when trained on in-domain labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture matching signal to improve generalization of dense retrieval by capturing matching signal between two texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be combined with different training methods to improve generalization ability without additional inference overhead and target domain data. |
Multi-View Document Representation Learning for Open-Domain Dense Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval are hard to match with multiple views. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view document representation learning framework to generate multiple embeddings through viewers to represent documents and enforce them to align with different queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms recent works and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing training data is sparse, with each document associated with one or a few labeled queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free potential query retrieval framework to address this problem . they use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture comprehensive semantic information from a document with multiple queries. |
On Complementarity Objectives for Hybrid Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hybrid retrieval focus on sparse models to capture “residual” features neglected in spars. |
| Approach: | They propose a new objective to capture a fuller notion of complementarity . they propose to improve the model's Ratio of Complementarity to improve RoC . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three representative IR benchmarks with statistical significance. |
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a learned dense retrieval model is often overlooked when using a corpus for inference, resulting in a design choice of retrieval unit . granularity of retrievals is important for both retrieval and downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval unit for dense retrieval that uses propositions to index corpus . propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval unit outperforms passage-level units on retrieval and downstream tasks. |
Learning to Select: Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection for Dense Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval use pseudo-relevance feedback to model dimension importance . however, they learn global transformations shared across queries and do not model dimension-aware dimension importance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection framework that learns to predict per-dimension importance directly from query embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval effectiveness over the full-dimensional and PRF-based models. |
Typos Correction Training against Misspellings from Text-to-Text Transformers (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval systems suffer from typoed queries due to mistyping or phonetic typing errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates the spelling correction objective into the DR model and a prompt-based augmentation technique to enhance the alignment of the typoed query and its original query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing typos-aware training approaches and sophisticated training advanced retrievers. |
LangSAE Editing: Improving Multilingual Information Retrieval via Post-hoc Language Identity Removal (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval in multilingual environments encode language identity alongside semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains on pooled embeddings to remove language-identity signal directly in vector space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ranking quality and cross-language coverage across multiple languages with especially strong gains for script-distinct languages. |
SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval models have been successful in a number of applications but it is unclear whether they truly understand semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for semantic understanding in dense retrieval that characterizes semantic precision, semantic abstraction and semantic equivalence along three dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model characterizes semantic understanding in dense retrieval along three dimensions: semantic precision, semantic abstraction, and semantic equivalence. |