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arXiv · 2505.19307

Aligning Web Query Generation with Ranking Objectives via Direct Preference Optimization

João Coelho·Bruno Martins·João Magalhães·Chenyan Xiong
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Abstract

Neural retrieval models excel in Web search, but their training requires substantial amounts of labeled query-document pairs, which are costly to obtain. With the widespread availability of Web document collections like ClueWeb22, synthetic queries generated by large language models offer a scalable alternative. Still, synthetic training queries often vary in quality, which leads to suboptimal downstream retrieval performance. Existing methods typically filter out noisy query-document pairs based on signals from an external re-ranker. In contrast, we propose a framework that leverages Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to integrate ranking signals into the query generation process, aiming to directly optimize the model towards generating high-quality queries that maximize downstream retrieval effectiveness. Experiments show higher ranker-assessed relevance between query-document pairs after DPO, leading to stronger downstream performance on the MS~MARCO benchmark when compared to baseline models trained with synthetic data.

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João Coelho, Bruno Martins, João Magalhães, Chenyan Xiong. 2025-05-25. Aligning Web Query Generation with Ranking Objectives via Direct Preference Optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19307

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