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arXiv · 2610.35045

CA-HNM: Constraint-Aware Hard Negative Mining for Dense Retrieval with Structured Domain Models

Ngoc Luyen Le·Marie-Hélène Abel·Bertrand Laforge
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Abstract

Dense retrievers are commonly trained with hard negatives selected from lexical or dense retrieval results. Retrieval proximity, however, does not indicate whether a candidate conflicts with explicit domain structure. We introduce CA-HNM, a constraint-aware hard-negative mining framework that combines retrieval-based candidate generation with deterministic incompatibility rules derived from a structured domain model. The framework removes known positives, constructs a local typed context around the query target, records relational, scope, target, and level mismatches, and uses the resulting candidates to fine-tune a standard dual encoder. Structured information is required only during offline negative construction. We evaluate CA-HNM on MOOCCubeX and Course-Skill Atlas with two encoders, two training losses, and ten seeds. Relative to a retrieval-rank-matched control, CA-HNM-Pure has higher mean NDCG@10 in six of eight dataset--encoder--loss configurations. Four hierarchical 95% bootstrap intervals are entirely above zero, mostly under triplet loss. In a separate experiment, CA-HNM-Mixed shows slightly higher mean NDCG@10 than a matched-mixed control on both collections. Structural variants show that changes in available structure can also change candidate eligibility and negative-pool composition. The results indicate that the contribution of constraint-aware selection depends on the training objective and the composition of the negative pool.

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Ngoc Luyen Le, Marie-Hélène Abel, Bertrand Laforge. 2026-10-26. CA-HNM: Constraint-Aware Hard Negative Mining for Dense Retrieval with Structured Domain Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35045

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