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arXiv · 2501.14434

Remining Hard Negatives for Generative Pseudo Labeled Domain Adaptation

Goksenin Yuksel·David Rau·Jaap Kamps
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Abstract

Dense retrievers have demonstrated significant potential for neural information retrieval; however, they exhibit a lack of robustness to domain shifts, thereby limiting their efficacy in zero-shot settings across diverse domains. A state-of-the-art domain adaptation technique is Generative Pseudo Labeling (GPL). GPL uses synthetic query generation and initially mined hard negatives to distill knowledge from cross-encoder to dense retrievers in the target domain. In this paper, we analyze the documents retrieved by the domain-adapted model and discover that these are more relevant to the target queries than those of the non-domain-adapted model. We then propose refreshing the hard-negative index during the knowledge distillation phase to mine better hard negatives. Our remining R-GPL approach boosts ranking performance in 13/14 BEIR datasets and 9/12 LoTTe datasets. Our contributions are (i) analyzing hard negatives returned by domain-adapted and non-domain-adapted models and (ii) applying the GPL training with and without hard-negative re-mining in LoTTE and BEIR datasets.

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Goksenin Yuksel, David Rau, Jaap Kamps. 2025-01-24. Remining Hard Negatives for Generative Pseudo Labeled Domain Adaptation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14434

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