用多个查询向量同时检索,提升复杂问题的召回效果。
Beyond Single Embeddings: Capturing Diverse Targets with Multi-Query Retrieval
- 自回归生成多个查询向量,覆盖不同语义方向
- 在合成数据上性能提升4倍,真实数据增益达21%
- 适合多义词或答案分散的检索任务
现有文本检索器通常只生成一个查询向量,但查询对应的文档分布可能具有多模态特性,例如代表查询的不同解释。我们量化了现有检索器的局限性:当目标文档嵌入向量间距离增大时,性能下降更显著。为此,提出自动回归多嵌入检索器(AMER),通过自回归方式生成多个查询向量,并全部用于文档检索。在合成向量数据上,该方法可完美捕捉多目标分布,性能比单嵌入模型高4倍。在真实世界多答案检索数据集上微调后评估,相对于单嵌入基线,在两个数据集上分别取得4%和21%的相对提升。尤其在目标文档嵌入差异较大的子集上,增益更明显。结果表明多查询向量检索具有潜力,开辟了新研究方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Most text retrievers generate \emph{one} query vector to retrieve relevant documents. Yet, the conditional distribution of relevant documents for the query may be multimodal, e.g., representing different interpretations of the query. We first quantify the limitations of existing retrievers. All retrievers we evaluate struggle more as the distance between target document embeddings grows. To address this limitation, we develop a new retriever architecture, \emph{A}utoregressive \emph{M}ulti-\emph{E}mbedding \emph{R}etriever (AMER). Our model autoregressively generates multiple query vectors, and all the predicted query vectors are used to retrieve documents from the corpus. We show that on the synthetic vectorized data, the proposed method could capture multiple target distributions perfectly, showing 4x better performance than single embedding model. We also fine-tune our model on real-world multi-answer retrieval datasets and evaluate in-domain. AMER presents 4 and 21\% relative gains over single-embedding baselines on two datasets we evaluate on. Furthermore, we consistently observe larger gains on the subset of dataset where the embeddings of the target documents are less similar to each other. We demonstrate the potential of using a multi-query vector retriever and open up a new direction for future work.
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