Neural ‘dense’ retrieval models are state of the art for many datasets, however these models often exhibit limited domain transfer ability. Existing approaches to adaptation are unwieldy, such as requiring explicit supervision, complex model architectures, or massive external models. We present ABEL, a simple but effective unsupervised method to enhance passage retrieval in zero-shot settings. Our technique follows a straightforward loop: a dense retriever learns from supervision signals provided by a reranker, and subsequently, the reranker is updated based on feedback from the improved retriever. By iterating this loop, the two components mutually enhance one another’s performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our unsupervised ABEL model outperforms both leading supervised and unsupervised retrievers on the BEIR benchmark. Meanwhile, it exhibits strong adaptation abilities to tasks and domains that were unseen during training. By either fine-tuning ABEL on labelled data or integrating it with existing supervised dense retrievers, we achieve state-of-the-art results.

Although existing neural retrieval models reveal promising results when training data is abundant and the performance keeps improving as training data increases, collecting high-quality annotated data is prohibitively costly. To this end, we introduce a novel noisy self-training framework combined with synthetic queries, showing that neural retrievers can be improved in a self-evolution manner with no reliance on any external models. Experimental results show that our method improves consistently over existing methods on both general-domain (e.g., MS-MARCO) and out-of-domain (i.e., BEIR) retrieval benchmarks. Extra analysis on low-resource settings reveals that our method is data efficient and outperforms competitive baselines, with as little as 30% of labelled training data. Further extending the framework for reranker training demonstrates that the proposed method is general and yields additional gains on tasks of diverse domains.

The best methods for knowledge graph completion use a ‘dual-encoding’ framework, a form of neural model with a bottleneck that facilitates fast approximate search over a vast collection of candidates. These approaches are trained using contrastive learning to differentiate between known positive examples and sampled negative instances. The mechanism for sampling negatives to date has been very simple, driven by pragmatic engineering considerations (e.g., using mismatched instances from the same batch). We propose several novel means of finding more informative negatives, based on searching for candidates with high lexical overlaps, from the dual-encoder model and according to knowledge graph structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks show that our best single model improves consistently over previous methods and obtains new state-of-the-art performance, including the challenging large-scale Wikidata5M dataset. Combing different kinds of strategies through model ensembling results in a further performance boost.