# QAID: Question Answering Inspired Few-shot Intent Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01593 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01593/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01403/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04307/) (2019)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06871/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Natural Language Understanding Services for building Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05566/) (2019)
- [Efficient Few-Shot Learning Without Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11055/) (2022)
- [Adapting Language Models for Zero-shot Learning by Meta-tuning on Dataset and Prompt Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04670/) (2021)
- [DialoGLUE: A Natural Language Understanding Benchmark for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13570/) (2020)
- [Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08027/) (2021)
- [Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13009/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06349/) (2021)
- [Augmenting Sequential Recommendation with Pseudo-Prior Items via Reversely Pre-training Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00522/) (2021)
- [Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05782/) (2021)
- [Example-Driven Intent Prediction with Observers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08684/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text Classification with Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17541/) (2022)
- [Where to start? Analyzing the potential value of intermediate models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00107/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for Few-shot Intent Detection: Supervised Pre-training and Isotropization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07208/) (2022)
- [Cluster & Tune: Boost Cold Start Performance in Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10581/) (2022)
- [Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12673/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Dynamic Label Name Refinement for Few-Shot Dialogue Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15603/) (2024)
- [When LLMs are Unfit Use FastFit: Fast and Effective Text Classification with Many Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12365/) (2024)
- [A Two-Stage Prediction-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Multi-Intent NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02925/) (2024)
- [RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09773/) (2023)
- [Instance Relation Learning Network with Label Knowledge Propagation for Few-shot Multi-label Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07776/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Intent detection with semantically similar fine-grained intents is a challenging task. To address it, we reformulate intent detection as a question-answering retrieval task by treating utterances and intent names as questions and answers. To that end, we utilize a question-answering retrieval architecture and adopt a two stages training schema with batch contrastive loss. In the pre-training stage, we improve query representations through self-supervised training. Then, in the fine-tuning stage, we increase contextualized token-level similarity scores between queries and answers from the same intent. Our results on three few-shot intent detection benchmarks achieve state-of-the-art performance.