DREAM: 通过自回归建模实现密集检索嵌入
阅读原文· arxiv.orgDREAM是一种利用大语言模型(LLM)自回归下一token预测目标为密集检索嵌入模型提供监督训练的方法。它将检索器生成的查询-文档相似度分数注入冻结LLM的选定注意力头,使预测损失通过注意力机制为检索器提供梯度。在BEIR和RTEB检索基准上,使用0.5B至3B参数的嵌入骨干,DREAM均持续优于现有基线。
Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.