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arXiv · 2604.20850

Association Is Not Similarity: Learning Corpus-Specific Associations for Multi-Hop Retrieval

Jason Dury
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Abstract

Dense retrieval systems rank passages by embedding similarity to a query, but multi-hop questions require passages that are associatively related through shared reasoning chains. We introduce Association-Augmented Retrieval (AAR), a lightweight transductive reranking method that trains a small MLP (4.2M parameters) to learn associative relationships between passages in embedding space using contrastive learning on co-occurrence annotations. At inference time, AAR reranks an initial dense retrieval candidate set using bi-directional association scoring. On HotpotQA, AAR improves passage Recall@5 from 0.831 to 0.916 (+8.6 points) without evaluation-set tuning, with gains concentrated on hard questions where the dense baseline fails (+28.5 points). On MuSiQue, AAR achieves +10.1 points in the transductive setting. An inductive model trained on training-split associations and evaluated on unseen validation associations shows no significant improvement, suggesting that the method captures corpus-specific co-occurrences rather than transferable patterns. Ablation studies support this interpretation: training on semantically similar but non-associated passage pairs degrades retrieval below the baseline, while shuffling association pairs causes severe degradation. A downstream QA evaluation shows retrieval gains translate to +6.4 exact match improvement. The method adds 3.7ms per query, trains in under two minutes on a single GPU, and requires no LLM-based indexing.

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BibTeXRIS

Jason Dury. 2026-02-13. Association Is Not Similarity: Learning Corpus-Specific Associations for Multi-Hop Retrieval. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18602385

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