Papers › Query-as-context Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval

Query-as-context Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval

19 Dec 2022arXiv:2212.09598archive 2025-07-28

Xing Wu, Guangyuan Ma, Wanhui Qian, Zijia Lin, Songlin Hu

Recently, methods have been developed to improve the performance of dense passage retrieval by using context-supervised pre-training. These methods simply consider two passages from the same document to be relevant, without taking into account the possibility of weakly correlated pairs. Thus, this paper proposes query-as-context pre-training, a simple yet effective pre-training technique to alleviate the issue. Query-as-context pre-training assumes that the query derived from a passage is more likely to be relevant to that passage and forms a passage-query pair. These passage-query pairs are then used in contrastive or generative context-supervised pre-training. The pre-trained models are evaluated on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks and out-of-domain zero-shot benchmarks. Experimental results show that query-as-context pre-training brings considerable gains and meanwhile speeds up training, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/caskcsg/ir/tree/main/cotmae-qc .

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Contrastive LearningPassage RetrievalRetrieval

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