mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

arXiv 2004.04906 ↗First posted 10 Apr 2020cs.CLcited by 3,779

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Cited by 986 in Retrieval-augmented generation, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Open-domain question answering relies on efficient passage retrieval to select candidate contexts, where traditional sparse vector space models, such as TF-IDF or BM25, are the de facto method. In this work, we show that retrieval can be practically implemented using dense representations alone, where embeddings are learned from a small number of questions and passages by a simple dual-encoder framework. When evaluated on a wide range of open-domain QA datasets, our dense retriever outperforms a strong Lucene-BM25 system largely by 9%-19% absolute in terms of top-20 passage retrieval accuracy, and helps our end-to-end QA system establish new state-of-the-art on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.

Key facts. Cited by 3,779 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2020: 1; 2021: 245; 2022: 385; 2023: 512; 2024: 737; 2025: 855; 2026: 1044.

3,779 papers.

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  2. 2023Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 2,185
  3. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,168
  4. 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,722
  5. 2023A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questionscited by 1,582
  6. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
  7. 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295
  8. 2021Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokenscited by 1,278
  9. 2021BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Modelscited by 1,225
  10. 2022LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applicationscited by 1,218
  11. 2022Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-trainingcited by 1,216
  12. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
38 more
  1. 2021Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learningcited by 1,203
  2. 2021What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?cited by 1,184
  3. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
  4. 2022When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memoriescited by 1,103
  5. 2024M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillationcited by 1,050
  6. 2022Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Modelscited by 940
  7. 2022Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questionscited by 911
  8. 2023REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Modelscited by 786
  9. 2023Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolationcited by 721
  10. 2021BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generationcited by 719
  11. 2023Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learningcited by 705
  12. 2023In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 694
  13. 2021Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversationcited by 691
  14. 2021Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learningcited by 641
  15. 2021VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understandingcited by 596
  16. 2023Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citationscited by 584
  17. 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 556
  18. 2023MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memorycited by 539
  19. 2024Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inferencecited by 527
  20. 2022MedMCQA : A Large-scale Multi-Subject Multi-Choice Dataset for Medical domain Question Answeringcited by 525
  21. 2024RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrievalcited by 519
  22. 2022Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labelscited by 508
  23. 2023Active Retrieval Augmented Generationcited by 506
  24. 2024NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Modelscited by 466
  25. 2021ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interactioncited by 464
  26. 2021Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrieverscited by 454
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  29. 2022Memory-Based Model Editing at Scalecited by 443
  30. 2024Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexitycited by 437
  31. 2023LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 414
  32. 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Basescited by 402
  33. 2023Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defensecited by 401
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  36. 2023Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Contextcited by 364
  37. 2022Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Trainingcited by 358
  38. 2024Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Reportcited by 357

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