A Study on the Efficiency and Generalization of Light Hybrid Retrievers
Man Luo, Shashank Jain, Anchit Gupta, Arash Einolghozati, Barlas Oguz, Debojeet Chatterjee, Xilun Chen, Chitta Baral, Peyman Heidari
Main: Information Retrieval and Text Mining Main-poster Paper
Poster Session 3: Information Retrieval and Text Mining (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 11, 09:00-10:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Poster Session 3 (13:00-14:30 UTC)
Keywords:
passage retrieval
TLDR:
Hybrid retrievers can take advantage of both sparse and dense retrievers. Previous hybrid retrievers leverage indexing-heavy dense retrievers. In this work, we study "Is it possible to reduce the indexing memory of hybrid retrievers without sacrificing performance"? Driven by this question, we lever...
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Abstract:
Hybrid retrievers can take advantage of both sparse and dense retrievers. Previous hybrid retrievers leverage indexing-heavy dense retrievers. In this work, we study "Is it possible to reduce the indexing memory of hybrid retrievers without sacrificing performance"? Driven by this question, we leverage an indexing-efficient dense retriever (i.e. DrBoost) and introduce a LITE retriever that further reduces the memory of DrBoost. LITE is jointly trained on contrastive learning and knowledge distillation from DrBoost.
Then, we integrate BM25, a sparse retriever, with either LITE or DrBoost to form light hybrid retrievers.
Our Hybrid-LITE retriever saves $13\times$ memory while maintaining $98.0\%$ performance of the hybrid retriever of BM25 and DPR. In addition, we study the generalization capacity of our light hybrid retrievers on out-of-domain dataset and a set of adversarial attacks datasets. Experiments showcase that light hybrid retrievers achieve better generalization performance than individual sparse and dense retrievers. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that there is a large room to improve the robustness of retrievers, suggesting a new research direction.