Lijie Ye
Author directory2026
AnInter: Anti-Interference Training for Long Context Retrieval
Lijie Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Lijie Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Dense retrievers in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have achieved substantial progress in semantic matching, but they remain limited in long context retrieval. In long context retrieval, target evidence often occupies only a small local span, while the remaining content acts as noise. We aim to improve long-document retrieval by enhancing retrievers’ anti-interference capability. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we construct the Anti-Interference Capability Benchmark (AICB) to evaluate retrievers’ anti-interference capability under controlled noise levels; (2) we propose anti-interference training as a short-text training path for improving long context retrieval; and (3) we train AnInter, a series of embedding models that are more robust to noisy long documents. Evaluation on LongEmbed shows that AnInter improves over its backbone by 16.4 points on average and achieves state-of-the-art performance on this challenging long context embedding benchmark. These results show that interference-aware training is a practical direction for improving long context retrieval.