Continual Learning of Long Topic Sequences in Neural Information Retrieval
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Abstract (arXiv)
In information retrieval (IR) systems, trends and users' interests may change over time, altering either the distribution of requests or contents to be recommended. Since neural ranking approaches heavily depend on the training data, it is crucial to understand the transfer capacity of recent IR approaches to address new domains in the long term. In this paper, we first propose a dataset based upon the MSMarco corpus aiming at modeling a long stream of topics as well as IR property-driven controlled settings. We then in-depth analyze the ability of recent neural IR models while continually learning those streams. Our empirical study highlights in which particular cases catastrophic forgetting occurs (e.g., level of similarity between tasks, peculiarities on text length, and ways of learning models) to provide future directions in terms of model design.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2022.
Builds on
33 of 45 references.
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21 more
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2023Advancing continual lifelong learning in neural information retrieval: definition, dataset, framework, and empirical evaluationcited by 5
- 2025Query Drift Compensation: Enabling Compatibility in Continual Learning of Retrieval Embedding Modelscited by 5
- 2024PromptDSI: Prompt-based Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Document Retrievalcited by 1
- 2026CREAM: Continual Retrieval on Dynamic Streaming Corpora with Adaptive Soft Memorycited by 1
- 2026CREAM: Continual Retrieval on Dynamic Streaming Corpora with Adaptive Soft Memory6 Jan 2026
- 2025Query Drift Compensation: Enabling Compatibility in Continual Learning of Retrieval Embedding Models27 May 2025
- 2024PromptDSI: Prompt-based Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Document Retrieval18 Jun 2024
- 2023Advancing continual lifelong learning in neural information retrieval: definition, dataset, framework, and empirical evaluation16 Aug 2023