{"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/unihgkr-unified-instruction-aware","title":"UniHGKR: Unified Instruction-aware Heterogeneous Knowledge Retrievers","arxiv_id":"2410.20163","date":"2024-10-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dehai Min","Zhiyang Xu","Guilin Qi","Lifu Huang","Chenyu You"],"abstract":"Existing information retrieval (IR) models often assume a homogeneous structure for knowledge sources and user queries, limiting their applicability in real-world settings where retrieval is inherently heterogeneous and diverse. In this paper, we introduce UniHGKR, a unified instruction-aware heterogeneous knowledge retriever that (1) builds a unified retrieval space for heterogeneous knowledge and (2) follows diverse user instructions to retrieve knowledge of specified types. UniHGKR consists of three principal stages: heterogeneous self-supervised pretraining, text-anchored embedding alignment, and instruction-aware retriever fine-tuning, enabling it to generalize across varied retrieval contexts. This framework is highly scalable, with a BERT-based version and a UniHGKR-7B version trained on large language models. Also, we introduce CompMix-IR, the first native heterogeneous knowledge retrieval benchmark. It includes two retrieval scenarios with various instructions, over 9,400 question-answer (QA) pairs, and a corpus of 10 million entries, covering four different types of data. Extensive experiments show that UniHGKR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CompMix-IR, achieving up to 6.36% and 54.23% relative improvements in two scenarios, respectively. Finally, by equipping our retriever for open-domain heterogeneous QA systems, we achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the popular ConvMix task, with an absolute improvement of up to 4.80 points.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20163v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20163v1.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":"unihgkr-unified-instruction-aware","repo_url":"https://github.com/ZhishanQ/UniHGKR","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"compmix-ir","name":"CompMix-IR","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2410.20163","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.20163","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.20163"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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