Recent studies demonstrate that query expansions generated by large language models (LLMs) can considerably enhance information retrieval systems by generating hypothetical documents that answer the queries as expansions. However, challenges arise from misalignments between the expansions and the retrieval corpus, resulting in issues like hallucinations and outdated information due to the limited intrinsic knowledge of LLMs. Inspired by Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF), we introduce Corpus-Steered Query Expansion (CSQE) to promote the incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. CSQE utilizes the relevance assessing capability of LLMs to systematically identify pivotal sentences in the initially-retrieved documents. These corpus-originated texts are subsequently used to expand the query together with LLM-knowledge empowered expansions, improving the relevance prediction between the query and the target documents. Extensive experiments reveal that CSQE exhibits strong performance without necessitating any training, especially with queries for which LLMs lack knowledge.

We propose a simple method that applies a large language model (LLM) to large-scale retrieval in zero-shot scenarios. Our method, the Large language model as Retriever (LameR), is built upon no other neural models but an LLM in a retrieval-augmented retrieval fashion, while breaking brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifting the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. Essentially, we propose to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query’s in-domain candidates. The candidates, regardless of correct or wrong, are obtained by a vanilla retrieval procedure on the target collection. As a part of the prompts, they are likely to help LLM generate more precise answers by pattern imitation or candidate summarization. Even if all the candidates are wrong, the prompts at least make LLM aware of in-collection patterns and genres. Moreover, due to the low performance of a self-supervised retriever, the LLM-based query augmentation becomes less effective as the retriever bottlenecks the whole pipeline. Therefore, we propose to leverage a non-parametric lexicon-based method (e.g., BM25) as the retrieval module to capture query-document overlap in a literal fashion. As such, LameR makes the retrieval procedure transparent to the LLM, thus circumventing the bottleneck.

We introduce a new unsupervised text embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks are versatile embeddings that yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law, offering a versatile and resource-efficient approach for embedding generation across diverse scenarios.

Dense retrievers have achieved impressive performance, but their demand for abundant training data limits their application scenarios. Contrastive pre-training, which constructs pseudo-positive examples from unlabeled data, has shown great potential to solve this problem. However, the pseudo-positive examples crafted by data augmentations can be irrelevant. To this end, we propose relevance-aware contrastive learning. It takes the intermediate-trained model itself as an imperfect oracle to estimate the relevance of positive pairs and adaptively weighs the contrastive loss of different pairs according to the estimated relevance. Our method consistently improves the SOTA unsupervised Contriever model on the BEIR and open-domain QA retrieval benchmarks. Further exploration shows that our method can not only beat BM25 after further pre-training on the target corpus but also serves as a good few-shot learner. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yibin-Lei/ReContriever.

Generating high-quality textual adversarial examples is critical for investigating the pitfalls of natural language processing (NLP) models and further promoting their robustness. Existing attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality, both affecting the attack effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Phrase-Level Textual Adversarial ATtack (PLAT) that generates adversarial samples through phrase-level perturbations. PLAT first extracts the vulnerable phrases as attack targets by a syntactic parser, and then perturbs them by a pre-trained blank-infilling model. Such flexible perturbation design substantially expands the search space for more effective attacks without introducing too many modifications, and meanwhile maintaining the textual fluency and grammaticality via contextualized generation using surrounding texts. Moreover, we develop a label preservation filter leveraging the likelihoods of language models fine-tuned on each class, rather than textual similarity, to rule out those perturbations that potentially alter the original class label for humans. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that PLAT has a superior attack effectiveness as well as a better label consistency than strong baselines.