When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866915318391111680 |
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| author | Ko, Dayoon Kim, Jinyoung Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Jinhyuk Lee, Jaehoon Song, Seonghak Lee, Minyoung Kim, Gunhee |
| author_facet | Ko, Dayoon Kim, Jinyoung Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Jinhyuk Lee, Jaehoon Song, Seonghak Lee, Minyoung Kim, Gunhee |
| contents | Dense retrievers encode texts into embeddings to efficiently retrieve relevant documents from large databases in response to user queries. However, real-world corpora continually evolve, leading to a shift from the original training distribution of the retriever. Without timely updates or retraining, indexing newly emerging documents can degrade retrieval performance for future queries. Thus, identifying when a dense retriever requires an update is critical for maintaining robust retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose a novel task of predicting whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing. Addressing this task allows us to proactively manage retriever updates, preventing potential retrieval failures. We introduce GradNormIR, an unsupervised approach that leverages gradient norms to detect OOD corpora effectively. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that GradNormIR enables timely updates of dense retrievers in evolving document collections, significantly enhancing retrieval robustness and efficiency. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_01877 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR Ko, Dayoon Kim, Jinyoung Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Jinhyuk Lee, Jaehoon Song, Seonghak Lee, Minyoung Kim, Gunhee Information Retrieval Computation and Language Dense retrievers encode texts into embeddings to efficiently retrieve relevant documents from large databases in response to user queries. However, real-world corpora continually evolve, leading to a shift from the original training distribution of the retriever. Without timely updates or retraining, indexing newly emerging documents can degrade retrieval performance for future queries. Thus, identifying when a dense retriever requires an update is critical for maintaining robust retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose a novel task of predicting whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing. Addressing this task allows us to proactively manage retriever updates, preventing potential retrieval failures. We introduce GradNormIR, an unsupervised approach that leverages gradient norms to detect OOD corpora effectively. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that GradNormIR enables timely updates of dense retrievers in evolving document collections, significantly enhancing retrieval robustness and efficiency. |
| title | When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR |
| topic | Information Retrieval Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01877 |