Cited by 367Information Retrieval and Search BehaviorTopic ModelingAdvanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques

Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels

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Gao, Luyu, Ma, Xueguang, Lin, Jimmy, Callan, Jamie·2023·Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

While dense retrieval has been shown to be effective and efficient across tasks and languages, it remains difficult to create effective fully zero-shot dense retrieval systems when no relevance labels are available.In this paper, we recognize the difficulty of zero-shot learning and encoding relevance.Instead, we propose to pivot through Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE).Given a query, HyDE first zero-shot prompts an instruction-following language model (e.g., InstructGPT) to generate a hypothetical document.The document captures relevance patterns but is "fake" and may contain hallucinations.Then, an unsupervised contrastively learned encoder (e.g., Contriever) encodes the document into an embedding vector.This vector identifies a neighborhood in the corpus embedding space, from which similar real documents are retrieved based on vector similarity.This second step grounds the generated document to the actual corpus, with the encoder's dense bottleneck filtering out the hallucinations.Our experiments show that HyDE significantly outperforms the state-ofthe-art unsupervised dense retriever Contriever and shows strong performance comparable to fine-tuned retrievers across various tasks (e.g.web search, QA, fact verification) and in non-English languages (e.g., sw, ko, ja, bn). 1

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  • Early RAG implementations often relied on document retrieval methods that introduced noise and excessive context.

    “Early RAG implementations, however, often relied on document retrieval methods that introduced noise and excessive context [26, 55, 60, 122].”

    From LEGO-GraphRAG: Modularizing Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Design Space Exploration (2025) · cites this paper as [26]

    The Introduction discusses dense retrieval and the difficulty of zero-shot retrieval, while the HyDE description discusses filtering hallucinated details from a generated hypothetical document. Neither passage addresses whether early RAG implementations often retrieved noisy documents or supplied excessive context; searches for those points found no supporting passage in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Nick Craswell, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz, Daniel Campos, and Ellen M. Voorhees. 2020. Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning track. arXiv:2003.07820. · arXiv
  2. Zheng Liu and Yingxia Shao. 2022. RetroMAE: Pre- training retrieval-oriented transformers via masked auto-encoder. arXiv:2205.12035. · arXiv
  3. Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, and Yinfei Yang. 2022. Large dual encoders are generalizable retrievers. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9844-9855, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics.
  4. Victor Sanh, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Stephen Bach, Lintang Sutawika, Zaid Alyafeai, Antoine Chaffin, Arnaud Stiegler, Arun Raja, Manan Dey, M Saiful Bari, Canwen Xu, Urmish Thakker, Shanya Sharma Sharma, Eliza Szczechla, Taewoon Kim, Gunjan Chhablani, Nihal V. Nayak, Debajyoti Datta, Jonathan Chang, Mike Tian-Jian Jiang, Han Wang, Matteo Manica, Sheng Shen, Zheng Xin Yong, Harshit Pandey, Rachel Bawden, Thomas Wang, Tr- ishala Neeraj, Jos Rozen, Abheesht Sharma, An- drea Santilli, Thibault Févry, Jason Alan Fries, Ryan Teehan, Teven Le Scao, Stella Biderman, Leo Gao, Thomas Wolf, and Alexander M. Rush. 2022. Multi- task prompted training enables zero-shot task gener- alization. In The Tenth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022, Virtual Event, April 25-29, 2022. OpenReview.net.
  5. Nandan Thakur, Nils Reimers, Andreas Rücklé, Ab- hishek Srivastava, and Iryna Gurevych. 2021. BEIR: A heterogeneous benchmark for zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval models. In Thirty-fifth Con- ference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 2).

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Authors
Gao, L., Ma, X., Lin, J., & Callan, J.
Affiliations
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
  • University of Waterloo (CA)
Venue
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2023
Pages
1762-1777
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385565351
Cited by
362
References
53
Citations by year
2026: 167 · 2025: 126 · 2024: 52 · 2023: 17
FWCI
93.04
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques
Keywords
unsupervised contrastive learning, multilingual information retrieval, web search, question answering, fact-checking

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