Entriever: Energy-based Retriever for Knowledge-Grounded Dialog Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cai, Yucheng, Li, Ke, Huang, Yi, Feng, Junlan, Ou, Zhijian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cai, Yucheng
Li, Ke
Huang, Yi
Feng, Junlan
Ou, Zhijian
author_facet Cai, Yucheng
Li, Ke
Huang, Yi
Feng, Junlan
Ou, Zhijian
contents A retriever, which retrieves relevant knowledge pieces from a knowledge base given a context, is an important component in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Retrievers have been introduced in knowledge-grounded dialog systems to improve knowledge acquisition. In knowledge-grounded dialog systems, when conditioning on a given context, there may be multiple relevant and correlated knowledge pieces. However, knowledge pieces are usually assumed to be conditionally independent in current retriever models. To address this issue, we propose Entriever, an energy-based retriever. Entriever directly models the candidate retrieval results as a whole instead of modeling the knowledge pieces separately, with the relevance score defined by an energy function. We explore various architectures of energy functions and different training methods for Entriever, and show that Entriever substantially outperforms the strong cross-encoder baseline in knowledge retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we show that in semi-supervised training of knowledge-grounded dialog systems, Entriever enables effective scoring of retrieved knowledge pieces and significantly improves end-to-end performance of dialog systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00585
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Entriever: Energy-based Retriever for Knowledge-Grounded Dialog Systems
Cai, Yucheng
Li, Ke
Huang, Yi
Feng, Junlan
Ou, Zhijian
Computation and Language
A retriever, which retrieves relevant knowledge pieces from a knowledge base given a context, is an important component in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Retrievers have been introduced in knowledge-grounded dialog systems to improve knowledge acquisition. In knowledge-grounded dialog systems, when conditioning on a given context, there may be multiple relevant and correlated knowledge pieces. However, knowledge pieces are usually assumed to be conditionally independent in current retriever models. To address this issue, we propose Entriever, an energy-based retriever. Entriever directly models the candidate retrieval results as a whole instead of modeling the knowledge pieces separately, with the relevance score defined by an energy function. We explore various architectures of energy functions and different training methods for Entriever, and show that Entriever substantially outperforms the strong cross-encoder baseline in knowledge retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we show that in semi-supervised training of knowledge-grounded dialog systems, Entriever enables effective scoring of retrieved knowledge pieces and significantly improves end-to-end performance of dialog systems.
title Entriever: Energy-based Retriever for Knowledge-Grounded Dialog Systems
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00585