arXiv:2606.24667cs.CL2026-06

用自回归语言模型训练稠密检索嵌入,无需人工标注正负样本。

DREAM: Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling

  • 将检索相似度分数注入冻结LLM的注意力头,通过预测损失反传梯度训练检索器。
  • 在BEIR和RTEB上,0.5B到3B参数模型均优于现有基线。
  • 适合无标注数据场景,尤其适合资源有限但需高效检索的系统设计者。

稠密检索嵌入模型是现代基于检索的AI系统的核心组件。大多数稠密检索器采用对比学习目标训练,需要成本高昂且难以获取的正负文档对。本文探讨大型语言模型(LLM)的自回归下一个词预测目标能否为稠密检索提供监督信号。基本思路是:若文档包含与查询相关的信息,以该文档为条件后,目标输出对LLM而言应更易预测。关键挑战在于,下一个词预测损失在LLM内部计算,而检索器是独立的嵌入模型。为此,我们提出DREAM(Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling),将检索器生成的查询-文档相似度分数注入冻结的LLM的选定注意力头。训练过程中,这些分数决定每个候选文档的注意力权重,而LLM预测目标输出。由此产生的预测损失通过注意力机制反向传播至检索器,实现训练。我们在包含0.5B至3B参数的多种骨干模型上,在BEIR和RTEB基准上评估DREAM,结果一致优于现有基线,证明DREAM是一种通过自回归建模训练稠密检索器的可行且高效的新方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.

稠密检索自回归无监督训练

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