LexMAE: Lexicon-Bottlenecked Pretraining for Large-Scale Retrieval

Tao Shen, Xiubo Geng, Chongyang Tao, Can Xu, Xiaolong Huang, Binxing Jiao, Linjun Yang, Daxin Jiang

Keywords: Self-Supervised Learning, Lexicon Representation, Large-Scale Retrieval

Abstract: In large-scale retrieval, the lexicon-weighting paradigm, learning weighted sparse representations in vocabulary space, has shown promising results with high quality and low latency. Despite it deeply exploiting the lexicon-representing capability of pre-trained language models, a crucial gap remains between language modeling and lexicon-weighting retrieval -- the former preferring certain or low-entropy words whereas the latter favoring pivot or high-entropy words -- becoming the main barrier to lexicon-weighting performance for large-scale retrieval. To bridge this gap, we propose a brand-new pre-training framework, lexicon-bottlenecked masked autoencoder (LexMAE), to learn importance-aware lexicon representations. Essentially, we present a lexicon-bottlenecked module between a normal language modeling encoder and a weakened decoder, where a continuous bag-of-words bottleneck is constructed to learn a lexicon-importance distribution in an unsupervised fashion. The pre-trained LexMAE is readily transferred to the lexicon-weighting retrieval via fine-tuning. On the ad-hoc retrieval benchmark, MS-Marco, it achieves 42.6% MRR@10 with 45.8 QPS for the passage dataset and 44.4% MRR@100 with 134.8 QPS for the document dataset, by a CPU machine. And LexMAE shows state-of-the-art zero-shot transfer capability on BEIR benchmark with 12 datasets.

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TL;DR: A new pre-training framework, dubbed lexicon-bottlenecked masked autoencoder, is proposed to learn importance-aware lexicon representations in line with the lexicon-weighting paradigm for large-scale retrieval.

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2208.14754/code)