{"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/duqgen-effective-unsupervised-domain","title":"DUQGen: Effective Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Rankers by Diversifying Synthetic Query Generation","arxiv_id":"2404.02489","date":"2024-04-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ramraj Chandradevan","Kaustubh D. Dhole","Eugene Agichtein"],"abstract":"State-of-the-art neural rankers pre-trained on large task-specific training data such as MS-MARCO, have been shown to exhibit strong performance on various ranking tasks without domain adaptation, also called zero-shot. However, zero-shot neural ranking may be sub-optimal, as it does not take advantage of the target domain information. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficiently large and high quality target training data to improve a modern neural ranker can be costly and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to unsupervised domain adaptation for ranking, DUQGen, which addresses a critical gap in prior literature, namely how to automatically generate both effective and diverse synthetic training data to fine tune a modern neural ranker for a new domain. Specifically, DUQGen produces a more effective representation of the target domain by identifying clusters of similar documents; and generates a more diverse training dataset by probabilistic sampling over the resulting document clusters. Our extensive experiments, over the standard BEIR collection, demonstrate that DUQGen consistently outperforms all zero-shot baselines and substantially outperforms the SOTA baselines on 16 out of 18 datasets, for an average of 4% relative improvement across all datasets. We complement our results with a thorough analysis for more in-depth understanding of the proposed method's performance and to identify promising areas for further improvements.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02489v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02489v1.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":"duqgen-effective-unsupervised-domain","repo_url":"https://github.com/emory-irlab/duqgen","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"domain-adaptation","task_name":"Domain Adaptation"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-domain-adaptation","task_name":"Unsupervised Domain Adaptation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2404.02489","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.02489","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}