# Improving Retrieval in Sponsored Search by Leveraging Query Context Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14346 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14346/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [AnnoLLM: Making Large Language Models to Be Better Crowdsourced Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16854/) (2023)
- [DECAF: Deep Extreme Classification with Label Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00368/) (2021)
- [NGAME: Negative Mining-aware Mini-batching for Extreme Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04452/) (2022)
- [Diversity driven Query Rewriting in Search Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03816/) (2021)
- [An end-to-end Generative Retrieval Method for Sponsored Search Engine --Decoding Efficiently into a Closed Target Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00592/) (2019)
- [ProphetNet-Ads: A Looking Ahead Strategy for Generative Retrieval Models in Sponsored Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10789/) (2020)
- [Unified Generative & Dense Retrieval for Query Rewriting in Sponsored Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05861/) (2022)
- [Scaling the Vocabulary of Non-autoregressive Models for Efficient Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06739/) (2024)

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

- [We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05973/) (2025)
- [Disentangling Curriculum Learning in NLP: Towards a Unifying Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately retrieving relevant bid keywords for user queries is critical in Sponsored Search but remains challenging, particularly for short, ambiguous queries. Existing dense and generative retrieval models often fail to capture nuanced user intent in these cases. To address this, we propose an approach to enhance query understanding by augmenting queries with rich contextual signals derived from web search results and large language models, stored in an online cache. Specifically, we use web search titles and snippets to ground queries in real-world information and utilize GPT-4 to generate query rewrites and explanations that clarify user intent. These signals are efficiently integrated through a Fusion-in-Decoder based Unity architecture, enabling both dense and generative retrieval with serving costs on par with traditional context-free models. To address scenarios where context is unavailable in the cache, we introduce context glancing, a curriculum learning strategy that improves model robustness and performance even without contextual signals during inference. Extensive offline experiments demonstrate that our context-aware approach substantially outperforms context-free models. Furthermore, online A/B testing on a prominent search engine across 160+ countries shows significant improvements in user engagement and revenue.