Researchers from Cornell University developed a technique called 'contextual document embeddings' to improve the performance of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, enhancing the retrieval of relevant documents by making embedding models more context-aware.
Standard methods like bi-encoders often fail to account for context-specific details, leading to poor performance in application-specific datasets. Contextual document embeddings address this by enhancing the sensitivity of the embedding model to subtle differences in documents, particularly in specialized domains.
The researchers proposed two complementary methods to improve bi-encoders:
- Modifying the training process using contrastive learning to distinguish between similar documents.
- Modifying the bi-encoder architecture to incorporate corpus context during the embedding process.
These modifications allow the model to capture both the general context and specific details of documents, leading to better performance, especially in out-of-domain scenarios. The new technique has shown consistent improvements over standard bi-encoders and can be adapted for various applications beyond text-based models.
Standard methods like bi-encoders often fail to account for context-specific details, leading to poor performance in application-specific datasets. Contextual document embeddings address this by enhancing the sensitivity of the embedding model to subtle differences in documents, particularly in specialized domains.
The researchers proposed two complementary methods to improve bi-encoders:
- Modifying the training process using contrastive learning to distinguish between similar documents.
- Modifying the bi-encoder architecture to incorporate corpus context during the embedding process.
These modifications allow the model to capture both the general context and specific details of documents, leading to better performance, especially in out-of-domain scenarios. The new technique has shown consistent improvements over standard bi-encoders and can be adapted for various applications beyond text-based models.
ColBERT is a new way of scoring passage relevance using a BERT language model that substantially solves the problems with dense passage retrieval.
