# VIRT: Improving Representation-based Models for Text Matching through Virtual Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02984/) (2020)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [An efficient framework for learning sentence representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02893/) (2018)
- [Poly-encoders: Transformer Architectures and Pre-training Strategies for Fast and Accurate Multi-sentence Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01969/) (2019)
- [Distilling Task-Specific Knowledge from BERT into Simple Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12136/) (2019)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01627/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Matching Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03244/) (2015)
- [Learning to Match Using Local and Distributed Representations of Text for Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08136/) (2016)
- [Generating Sentences from Disentangled Syntactic and Semantic Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05789/) (2019)
- [Natural Language Understanding with the Quora Question Pairs Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01041/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Alleviating Attention Hacking in Discriminative Reward Modeling through Interaction Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02618/) (2025)
- [EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06839/) (2024)
- [ESCL: Equivariant Self-Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05143/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the booming of pre-trained transformers, representation-based models based on Siamese transformer encoders have become mainstream techniques for efficient text matching. However, these models suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of interaction between the text pair, compared with interaction-based models. Prior arts attempt to address this through performing extra interaction for Siamese encoded representations, while the interaction during encoding is still ignored. To remedy this, we propose a textitVirtual InteRacTion mechanism (VIRT) to transfer interactive knowledge from interaction-based models into Siamese encoders through attention map distillation. As a train-time-only component, VIRT could completely maintain the high efficiency of the Siamese structure and brings no extra computation cost during inference. To fully utilize the learned interactive knowledge, we further design a VIRT-adapted interaction strategy. Experimental results on multiple text matching datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art representation-based models. What's more, VIRT can be easily integrated into existing representation-based methods to achieve further improvements.