# Distillation Enhanced Generative Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10769/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07820/) (2020)
- [Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06991/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06967/) (2021)
- [Overview of the TREC 2020 deep learning track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07662/) (2021)
- [Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08553/) (2020)
- [Pre-training Tasks for Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03932/) (2020)
- [Improving Efficient Neural Ranking Models with Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02666/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10628/) (2022)
- [A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02743/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric LSH (ALSH) for Sublinear Time Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.5869/) (2014)
- [SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02578/) (2022)
- [Learning to Tokenize for Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04171/) (2023)
- [How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11841/) (2023)
- [Learning to Rank in Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15222/) (2023)
- [Curriculum Learning for Dense Retrieval Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13679/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08748/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative retrieval is a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that generates identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target. This paradigm leverages powerful generative language models, distinct from traditional sparse or dense retrieval methods. In this work, we identify a viable direction to further enhance generative retrieval via distillation and propose a feasible framework, named DGR. DGR utilizes sophisticated ranking models, such as the cross-encoder, in a teacher role to supply a passage rank list, which captures the varying relevance degrees of passages instead of binary hard labels; subsequently, DGR employs a specially designed distilled RankNet loss to optimize the generative retrieval model, considering the passage rank order provided by the teacher model as labels. This framework only requires an additional distillation step to enhance current generative retrieval systems and does not add any burden to the inference stage. We conduct experiments on four public datasets, and the results indicate that DGR achieves state-of-the-art performance among the generative retrieval methods. Additionally, DGR demonstrates exceptional robustness and generalizability with various teacher models and distillation losses.