Momentum Posterior Regularization for Multi-hop Dense Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xia, Zehua, Wu, Yuyang, Xia, Yiyun, Nguyen, Cam-Tu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xia, Zehua
Wu, Yuyang
Xia, Yiyun
Nguyen, Cam-Tu
author_facet Xia, Zehua
Wu, Yuyang
Xia, Yiyun
Nguyen, Cam-Tu
contents Multi-hop question answering (QA) often requires sequential retrieval (multi-hop retrieval), where each hop retrieves missing knowledge based on information from previous hops. To facilitate more effective retrieval, we aim to distill knowledge from a posterior retrieval, which has access to posterior information like an answer, into a prior retrieval used during inference when such information is unavailable. Unfortunately, current methods for knowledge distillation in one-time retrieval are ineffective for multi-hop QA due to two issues: 1) Posterior information is often defined as the response (i.e. the answer), which may not clearly connect to the query without intermediate retrieval; and 2) The large knowledge gap between prior and posterior retrievals makes existing distillation methods unstable, even resulting in performance loss. As such, we propose MoPo (Momentum Posterior Regularization) with two key innovations: 1) Posterior information of one hop is defined as a query-focus summary from the golden knowledge of the previous and current hops; 2) We develop an effective training strategy where the posterior retrieval is updated along with the prior retrieval via momentum moving average method, allowing smoother and effective distillation. Experiments on HotpotQA and StrategyQA demonstrate that MoPo outperforms existing baselines in both retrieval and downstream QA tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Momentum Posterior Regularization for Multi-hop Dense Retrieval
Xia, Zehua
Wu, Yuyang
Xia, Yiyun
Nguyen, Cam-Tu
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Multi-hop question answering (QA) often requires sequential retrieval (multi-hop retrieval), where each hop retrieves missing knowledge based on information from previous hops. To facilitate more effective retrieval, we aim to distill knowledge from a posterior retrieval, which has access to posterior information like an answer, into a prior retrieval used during inference when such information is unavailable. Unfortunately, current methods for knowledge distillation in one-time retrieval are ineffective for multi-hop QA due to two issues: 1) Posterior information is often defined as the response (i.e. the answer), which may not clearly connect to the query without intermediate retrieval; and 2) The large knowledge gap between prior and posterior retrievals makes existing distillation methods unstable, even resulting in performance loss. As such, we propose MoPo (Momentum Posterior Regularization) with two key innovations: 1) Posterior information of one hop is defined as a query-focus summary from the golden knowledge of the previous and current hops; 2) We develop an effective training strategy where the posterior retrieval is updated along with the prior retrieval via momentum moving average method, allowing smoother and effective distillation. Experiments on HotpotQA and StrategyQA demonstrate that MoPo outperforms existing baselines in both retrieval and downstream QA tasks.
title Momentum Posterior Regularization for Multi-hop Dense Retrieval
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20399