{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/aligning-language-models-for-versatile-text","title":"Aligning Language Models for Versatile Text-based Item Retrieval","arxiv_id":"2402.18899","date":"2024-02-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuxuan Lei","Jianxun Lian","Jing Yao","Mingqi Wu","Defu Lian","Xing Xie"],"abstract":"This paper addresses the gap between general-purpose text embeddings and the specific demands of item retrieval tasks. We demonstrate the shortcomings of existing models in capturing the nuances necessary for zero-shot performance on item retrieval tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose generate in-domain dataset from ten tasks tailored to unlocking models' representation ability for item retrieval. Our empirical studies demonstrate that fine-tuning embedding models on the dataset leads to remarkable improvements in a variety of retrieval tasks. We also illustrate the practical application of our refined model in a conversational setting, where it enhances the capabilities of LLM-based Recommender Agents like Chat-Rec. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18899v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.18899v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"aligning-language-models-for-versatile-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/recai","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}