{"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/improving-multitask-retrieval-by-promoting","title":"Improving Multitask Retrieval by Promoting Task Specialization","arxiv_id":"2307.00342","date":"2023-07-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wenzheng Zhang","Chenyan Xiong","Karl Stratos","Arnold Overwijk"],"abstract":"In multitask retrieval, a single retriever is trained to retrieve relevant contexts for multiple tasks. Despite its practical appeal, naive multitask retrieval lags behind task-specific retrieval in which a separate retriever is trained for each task. We show that it is possible to train a multitask retriever that outperforms task-specific retrievers by promoting task specialization. The main ingredients are: (1) a better choice of pretrained model (one that is explicitly optimized for multitasking) along with compatible prompting, and (2) a novel adaptive learning method that encourages each parameter to specialize in a particular task. The resulting multitask retriever is highly performant on the KILT benchmark. Upon analysis, we find that the model indeed learns parameters that are more task-specialized compared to naive multitasking without prompting or adaptive learning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00342v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00342v1.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":"improving-multitask-retrieval-by-promoting","repo_url":"https://github.com/wenzhengzhang/taco","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":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}