Papers › RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain...
RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
Yingqi Qu, Yuchen Ding, Jing Liu, Kai Liu, Ruiyang Ren, Wayne Xin Zhao, daxiang dong, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
In open-domain question answering, dense passage retrieval has become a new paradigm to retrieve relevant passages for finding answers. Typically, the dual-encoder architecture is adopted to learn dense representations of questions and passages for semantic matching. However, it is difficult to effectively train a dual-encoder due to the challenges including the discrepancy between training and inference, the existence of unlabeled positives and limited training data. To address these challenges, we propose an optimized training approach, called RocketQA, to improving dense passage retrieval. We make three major technical contributions in RocketQA, namely cross-batch negatives, denoised hard negatives and data augmentation. The experiment results show that RocketQA significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions. We also conduct extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of the three strategies in RocketQA. Besides, we demonstrate that the performance of end-to-end QA can be improved based on our RocketQA retriever.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passage Retrieval | Natural Questions | RocketQA | Precision@100 | 88.5 | #4 of 10 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Passage Retrieval | Natural Questions | RocketQA | Precision@20 | 82.7 | #4 of 10 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections