Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations

Ji Xin, Chenyan Xiong, Ashwin Srinivasan, Ankita Sharma, Damien Jose, Paul Bennett


Abstract
Dense retrieval (DR) methods conduct text retrieval by first encoding texts in the embedding space and then matching them by nearest neighbor search. This requires strong locality properties from the representation space, e.g., close allocations of each small group of relevant texts, which are hard to generalize to domains without sufficient training data. In this paper, we aim to improve the generalization ability of DR models from source training domains with rich supervision signals to target domains without any relevance label, in the zero-shot setting. To achieve that, we propose Momentum adversarial Domain Invariant Representation learning (MoDIR), which introduces a momentum method to train a domain classifier that distinguishes source versus target domains, and then adversarially updates the DR encoder to learn domain invariant representations. Our experiments show that MoDIR robustly outperforms its baselines on 10+ ranking datasets collected in the BEIR benchmark in the zero-shot setup, with more than 10% relative gains on datasets with enough sensitivity for DR models’ evaluation. Source code is available at https://github.com/ji-xin/modir.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-acl.316
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4008–4020
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.316
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.316
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ji Xin, Chenyan Xiong, Ashwin Srinivasan, Ankita Sharma, Damien Jose, and Paul Bennett. 2022. Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, pages 4008–4020, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations (Xin et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.findings-acl.316.pdf
Data
BEIRNatural QuestionsTREC-COVID