Reduce Catastrophic Forgetting of Dense Retrieval Training with Teleportation Negatives

Si Sun, Chenyan Xiong, Yue Yu, Arnold Overwijk, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Bao


Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the instability in the standard dense retrieval training, which iterates between model training and hard negative selection using the being-trained model. We show the catastrophic forgetting phenomena behind the training instability, where models learn and forget different negative groups during training iterations. We then propose ANCE-Tele, which accumulates momentum negatives from past iterations and approximates future iterations using lookahead negatives, as “teleportations” along the time axis to smooth the learning process. On web search and OpenQA, ANCE-Tele outperforms previous state-of-the-art systems of similar size, eliminates the dependency on sparse retrieval negatives, and is competitive among systems using significantly more (50x) parameters. Our analysis demonstrates that teleportation negatives reduce catastrophic forgetting and improve convergence speed for dense retrieval training. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/ANCE-Tele.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.445
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6639–6654
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.445
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.445
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Si Sun, Chenyan Xiong, Yue Yu, Arnold Overwijk, Zhiyuan Liu, and Jie Bao. 2022. Reduce Catastrophic Forgetting of Dense Retrieval Training with Teleportation Negatives. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6639–6654, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reduce Catastrophic Forgetting of Dense Retrieval Training with Teleportation Negatives (Sun et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.445.pdf