BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers
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Abstract (arXiv)
Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedical tasks but still challenging due to the deficiency of sufficient publicly annotated biomedical data and computational resources. We present BMRetriever, a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedical corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets verify BMRetriever's efficacy on various biomedical applications. BMRetriever also exhibits strong parameter efficiency, with the 410M variant outperforming baselines up to 11.7 times larger, and the 2B variant matching the performance of models with over 5B parameters. The training data and model checkpoints are released at urlhttps://huggingface.co/BMRetriever to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and application to new domains.
Key facts. Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 60 of its 98 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2024.
Builds on
60 of 98 references.
References · 60
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- 2021Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrieverscited by 454
- 2020SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformerscited by 426
- 2020RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 410
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- 2020Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representationscited by 233
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- 2022SGPT: GPT Sentence Embeddings for Semantic Searchcited by 204
- 2021Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrievalcited by 203
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- 2025RAG in the Wild: On the (In)effectiveness of LLMs with Mixture-of-Knowledge Retrieval Augmentation26 Jul 2025
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- 2024OG-RAG: Ontology-Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Large Language Models12 Dec 2024
- 2024RAMIE: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-task Information Extraction with Large Language Models on Dietary Supplements24 Nov 2024
- 2024SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains23 Oct 2024
- 2024Intermediate Distillation: Data-Efficient Distillation from Black-Box LLMs for Information Retrieval18 Jun 2024
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- 2025GRIL: Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Integrated Learning with Large Language Models20 Sep 2025
- 2025End-to-End Agentic RAG System Training for Traceable Diagnostic Reasoning21 Aug 2025
- 2025Collab-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Complex Question Answering via White-Box and Black-Box LLM Collaboration7 Apr 2025
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- 2025FailureSensorIQ: A Multi-Choice QA Dataset for Understanding Sensor Relationships and Failure Modescited by 6
- 2025DisastIR: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark for Disaster Managementcited by 3
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12 most cited of 26 All 26 (JSON)
- 2026REPAIR: Resolving Long-Tail Confusion in Scientific Retrievers via Fact-Verified Iterative Refinement16 Sep 2026
- 2026When Cases Get Rare: A Retrieval Benchmark for Off-Guideline Clinical Question Answering20 May 2026
- 2026BioHiCL: Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning for Biomedical Retrieval with MeSH Labels17 Apr 2026
- 2026From Exposure to Internalization: Dual-Stream Calibration for In-context Clinical Reasoning7 Apr 2026
- 2026Asking the Right Questions: Ontology-Grounded Interpretable Embeddings for Biomedical Text2 Mar 2026
- 2026Modular Expert Merging for Biomedical Retrieval4 Feb 2026
- 2026Tracing the Data Trail: A Survey of Data Provenance, Transparency and Traceability in LLMs19 Jan 2026
- 2025Investigating LLM Capabilities on Long Context Comprehension for Medical Question Answering21 Oct 2025
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- 2025jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Listwise Document Reranking29 Sep 2025
- 2025Exploring the Capabilities of Large Language Model Encoders for Image-Text Retrieval in Chest X-rays17 Sep 2025
- 2025MedSEBA: Synthesizing Evidence-Based Answers Grounded in Evolving Medical Literature30 Aug 2025
12 newest of 26 All 26 (JSON)