Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sinhababu, Nilanjan, Parry, Andrew, Ganguly, Debasis, Samanta, Debasis, Mitra, Pabitra
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Sinhababu, Nilanjan
Parry, Andrew
Ganguly, Debasis
Samanta, Debasis
Mitra, Pabitra
author_facet Sinhababu, Nilanjan
Parry, Andrew
Ganguly, Debasis
Samanta, Debasis
Mitra, Pabitra
contents A supervised ranking model, despite its advantage of being effective, usually involves complex processing - typically multiple stages of task-specific pre-training and fine-tuning. This has motivated researchers to explore simpler pipelines leveraging large language models (LLMs) that are capable of working in a zero-shot manner. However, since zero-shot inference does not make use of a training set of pairs of queries and their relevant documents, its performance is mostly worse than that of supervised models, which are trained on such example pairs. Motivated by the existing findings that training examples generally improve zero-shot performance, in our work, we explore if this also applies to ranking models. More specifically, given a query and a pair of documents, the preference prediction task is improved by augmenting examples of preferences for similar queries from a training set. Our proposed pairwise few-shot ranker demonstrates consistent improvements over the zero-shot baseline on both in-domain (TREC DL) and out-domain (BEIR subset) retrieval benchmarks. Our method also achieves a close performance to that of a supervised model without requiring any complex training pipeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_17745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model
Sinhababu, Nilanjan
Parry, Andrew
Ganguly, Debasis
Samanta, Debasis
Mitra, Pabitra
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
A supervised ranking model, despite its advantage of being effective, usually involves complex processing - typically multiple stages of task-specific pre-training and fine-tuning. This has motivated researchers to explore simpler pipelines leveraging large language models (LLMs) that are capable of working in a zero-shot manner. However, since zero-shot inference does not make use of a training set of pairs of queries and their relevant documents, its performance is mostly worse than that of supervised models, which are trained on such example pairs. Motivated by the existing findings that training examples generally improve zero-shot performance, in our work, we explore if this also applies to ranking models. More specifically, given a query and a pair of documents, the preference prediction task is improved by augmenting examples of preferences for similar queries from a training set. Our proposed pairwise few-shot ranker demonstrates consistent improvements over the zero-shot baseline on both in-domain (TREC DL) and out-domain (BEIR subset) retrieval benchmarks. Our method also achieves a close performance to that of a supervised model without requiring any complex training pipeline.
title Few-shot Prompting for Pairwise Ranking: An Effective Non-Parametric Retrieval Model
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17745