# Disentangled Modeling of Domain and Relevance for Adaptable Dense Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.05753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05753/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05720/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06967/) (2021)
- [Document Expansion by Query Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08375/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05540/) (2021)
- [Delta Tuning: A Comprehensive Study of Parameter Efficient Methods for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06904/) (2022)
- [Optimizing Dense Retrieval Model Training with Hard Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08051/) (2021)
- [Simple Entity-Centric Questions Challenge Dense Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08535/) (2021)
- [GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07577/) (2021)
- [DuReader: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset from Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05073/) (2017)
- [A Few Brief Notes on DeepImpact, COIL, and a Conceptual Framework for Information Retrieval Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14807/) (2021)
- [Learning Passage Impacts for Inverted Indexes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12016/) (2021)
- [Efficient Document Re-Ranking for Transformers by Precomputing Term Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14255/) (2020)
- [PROP: Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10137/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: Benchmarking Ranking Models in the Large-Data Regime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04021/) (2021)
- [Learning Discrete Representations via Constrained Clustering for Effective and Efficient Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05789/) (2021)
- [Multi-CPR: A Multi Domain Chinese Dataset for Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03367/) (2022)
- [LaPraDoR: Unsupervised Pretrained Dense Retriever for Zero-Shot Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06169/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RETA-LLM: A Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05212/) (2023)
- [Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06992/) (2024)
- [AdaSent: Efficient Domain-Adapted Sentence Embeddings for Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00408/) (2023)
- [From Regulatory Approvals to Patents: Cross-Domain Linking for Cardiovascular Device Traceability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28353/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advance in Dense Retrieval (DR) techniques has significantly improved the effectiveness of first-stage retrieval. Trained with large-scale supervised data, DR models can encode queries and documents into a low-dimensional dense space and conduct effective semantic matching. However, previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of DR models would drop by a large margin when the trained DR models are adopted in a target domain that is different from the domain of the labeled data. One of the possible reasons is that the DR model has never seen the target corpus and thus might be incapable of mitigating the difference between the training and target domains. In practice, unfortunately, training a DR model for each target domain to avoid domain shift is often a difficult task as it requires additional time, storage, and domain-specific data labeling, which are not always available. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel DR framework named Disentangled Dense Retrieval (DDR) to support effective and flexible domain adaptation for DR models. DDR consists of a Relevance Estimation Module (REM) for modeling domain-invariant matching patterns and several Domain Adaption Modules (DAMs) for modeling domain-specific features of multiple target corpora. By making the REM and DAMs disentangled, DDR enables a flexible training paradigm in which REM is trained with supervision once and DAMs are trained with unsupervised data. Comprehensive experiments in different domains and languages show that DDR significantly improves ranking performance compared to strong DR baselines and substantially outperforms traditional retrieval methods in most scenarios.