{"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/weakly-supervised-label-smoothing","title":"Weakly Supervised Label Smoothing","arxiv_id":"2012.08575","date":"2020-12-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gustavo Penha","Claudia Hauff"],"abstract":"We study Label Smoothing (LS), a widely used regularization technique, in the context of neural learning to rank (L2R) models. LS combines the ground-truth labels with a uniform distribution, encouraging the model to be less confident in its predictions. We analyze the relationship between the non-relevant documents-specifically how they are sampled-and the effectiveness of LS, discussing how LS can be capturing \"hidden similarity knowledge\" between the relevantand non-relevant document classes. We further analyze LS by testing if a curriculum-learning approach, i.e., starting with LS and after anumber of iterations using only ground-truth labels, is beneficial. Inspired by our investigation of LS in the context of neural L2R models, we propose a novel technique called Weakly Supervised Label Smoothing (WSLS) that takes advantage of the retrieval scores of the negative sampled documents as a weak supervision signal in the process of modifying the ground-truth labels. WSLS is simple to implement, requiring no modification to the neural ranker architecture. Our experiments across three retrieval tasks-passage retrieval, similar question retrieval and conversation response ranking-show that WSLS for pointwise BERT-based rankers leads to consistent effectiveness gains. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/dac85d48-6f71-4261-a7d8-040da6021c52/.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.08575v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.08575v1.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":"weakly-supervised-label-smoothing","repo_url":"https://github.com/Guzpenha/transformer_rankers","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"learning-to-rank","task_name":"Learning-To-Rank"},{"task_slug":"passage-retrieval","task_name":"Passage Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}