{"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/decoding-a-neural-retriever-s-latent-space","title":"Decoding a Neural Retriever's Latent Space for Query Suggestion","arxiv_id":"2210.12084","date":"2022-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Leonard Adolphs","Michelle Chen Huebscher","Christian Buck","Sertan Girgin","Olivier Bachem","Massimiliano Ciaramita","Thomas Hofmann"],"abstract":"Neural retrieval models have superseded classic bag-of-words methods such as BM25 as the retrieval framework of choice. However, neural systems lack the interpretability of bag-of-words models; it is not trivial to connect a query change to a change in the latent space that ultimately determines the retrieval results. To shed light on this embedding space, we learn a \"query decoder\" that, given a latent representation of a neural search engine, generates the corresponding query. We show that it is possible to decode a meaningful query from its latent representation and, when moving in the right direction in latent space, to decode a query that retrieves the relevant paragraph. In particular, the query decoder can be useful to understand \"what should have been asked\" to retrieve a particular paragraph from the collection. We employ the query decoder to generate a large synthetic dataset of query reformulations for MSMarco, leading to improved retrieval performance. On this data, we train a pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) T5 model for the application of query suggestion that outperforms both query reformulation and PRF information retrieval baselines.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12084v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.12084v1.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":"decoding-a-neural-retriever-s-latent-space","repo_url":"https://github.com/leox1v/query_decoder","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adafactor","method_name":"Adafactor"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"glu","method_name":"Gated Linear Unit"},{"method_slug":"inverse-square-root-schedule","method_name":"Inverse Square Root Schedule"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sentencepiece","method_name":"SentencePiece"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"t5","method_name":"T5"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.12084","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}