Unsupervised dense retrieval with conterfactual contrastive learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Haitian, Ai, Qingyao, Wang, Xiao, Liu, Yiqun, Lin, Fen, Liu, Qin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chen, Haitian
Ai, Qingyao
Wang, Xiao
Liu, Yiqun
Lin, Fen
Liu, Qin
author_facet Chen, Haitian
Ai, Qingyao
Wang, Xiao
Liu, Yiqun
Lin, Fen
Liu, Qin
contents Efficiently retrieving a concise set of candidates from a large document corpus remains a pivotal challenge in Information Retrieval (IR). Neural retrieval models, particularly dense retrieval models built with transformers and pretrained language models, have been popular due to their superior performance. However, criticisms have also been raised on their lack of explainability and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In response to these challenges, we propose to improve the robustness of dense retrieval models by enhancing their sensitivity of fine-graned relevance signals. A model achieving sensitivity in this context should exhibit high variances when documents' key passages determining their relevance to queries have been modified, while maintaining low variances for other changes in irrelevant passages. This sensitivity allows a dense retrieval model to produce robust results with respect to attacks that try to promote documents without actually increasing their relevance. It also makes it possible to analyze which part of a document is actually relevant to a query, and thus improve the explainability of the retrieval model. Motivated by causality and counterfactual analysis, we propose a series of counterfactual regularization methods based on game theory and unsupervised learning with counterfactual passages. Experiments show that, our method can extract key passages without reliance on the passage-level relevance annotations. Moreover, the regularized dense retrieval models exhibit heightened robustness against adversarial attacks, surpassing the state-of-the-art anti-attack methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_20756
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised dense retrieval with conterfactual contrastive learning
Chen, Haitian
Ai, Qingyao
Wang, Xiao
Liu, Yiqun
Lin, Fen
Liu, Qin
Information Retrieval
Efficiently retrieving a concise set of candidates from a large document corpus remains a pivotal challenge in Information Retrieval (IR). Neural retrieval models, particularly dense retrieval models built with transformers and pretrained language models, have been popular due to their superior performance. However, criticisms have also been raised on their lack of explainability and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In response to these challenges, we propose to improve the robustness of dense retrieval models by enhancing their sensitivity of fine-graned relevance signals. A model achieving sensitivity in this context should exhibit high variances when documents' key passages determining their relevance to queries have been modified, while maintaining low variances for other changes in irrelevant passages. This sensitivity allows a dense retrieval model to produce robust results with respect to attacks that try to promote documents without actually increasing their relevance. It also makes it possible to analyze which part of a document is actually relevant to a query, and thus improve the explainability of the retrieval model. Motivated by causality and counterfactual analysis, we propose a series of counterfactual regularization methods based on game theory and unsupervised learning with counterfactual passages. Experiments show that, our method can extract key passages without reliance on the passage-level relevance annotations. Moreover, the regularized dense retrieval models exhibit heightened robustness against adversarial attacks, surpassing the state-of-the-art anti-attack methods.
title Unsupervised dense retrieval with conterfactual contrastive learning
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20756