# Unsupervised Domain Adaption for Neural Information Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09350/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05720/) (2021)
- [Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11755/) (2022)
- [CONQRR: Conversational Query Rewriting for Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08558/) (2021)
- [InPars: Data Augmentation for Information Retrieval using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05144/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of BERT and ALBERT Sentence Embedding Performance on Downstream NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10642/) (2021)
- [LaPraDoR: Unsupervised Pretrained Dense Retriever for Zero-Shot Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06169/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural information retrieval requires costly annotated data for each target domain to be competitive. Synthetic annotation by query generation using Large Language Models or rule-based string manipulation has been proposed as an alternative, but their relative merits have not been analysed. In this paper, we compare both methods head-to-head using the same neural IR architecture. We focus on the BEIR benchmark, which includes test datasets from several domains with no training data, and explore two scenarios: zero-shot, where the supervised system is trained in a large out-of-domain dataset (MS-MARCO); and unsupervised domain adaptation, where, in addition to MS-MARCO, the system is fine-tuned in synthetic data from the target domain. Our results indicate that Large Language Models outperform rule-based methods in all scenarios by a large margin, and, more importantly, that unsupervised domain adaptation is effective compared to applying a supervised IR system in a zero-shot fashion. In addition we explore several sizes of open Large Language Models to generate synthetic data and find that a medium-sized model suffices. Code and models are publicly available for reproducibility.