# Boosting LLM-based Relevance Modeling with Distribution-Aware Robust Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12504/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning LLaMA for Multi-Stage Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08319/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06967/) (2021)
- [Large language models can accurately predict searcher preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10621/) (2023)
- [Shortcut Learning of Large Language Models in Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11857/) (2022)
- [Perspectives on Large Language Models for Relevance Judgment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09161/) (2023)
- [GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-distribution Generalization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08073/) (2022)
- [Text Matching as Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06359/) (2016)
- [eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08831/) (2024)
- [Two-stage LLM Fine-tuning with Less Specialization and More Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00635/) (2022)
- [Unveiling the Generalization Power of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09162/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Labeling for Automatic Relevance Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11266/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Tuning Makes a Good Classification Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16771/) (2022)
- [A Linguistic Study on Relevance Modeling in Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00956/) (2021)
- [Beyond Semantics: Learning a Behavior Augmented Relevance Model with Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05379/) (2023)
- [SPM: Structured Pretraining and Matching Architectures for Relevance Modeling in Meituan Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07711/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Alleviating LLM-based Generative Retrieval Hallucination in Alipay Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21098/) (2025)
- [ADORE: Autonomous Domain-Oriented Relevance Engine for E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02555/) (2025)
- [LORE: A Large Generative Model for Search Relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03025/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), recent endeavors have leveraged the capabilities of LLMs in relevance modeling, resulting in enhanced performance. This is usually done through the process of fine-tuning LLMs on specifically annotated datasets to determine the relevance between queries and items. However, there are two limitations when LLMs are naively employed for relevance modeling through fine-tuning and inference. First, it is not inherently efficient for performing nuanced tasks beyond simple yes or no answers, such as assessing search relevance. It may therefore tend to be overconfident and struggle to distinguish fine-grained degrees of relevance (e.g., strong relevance, weak relevance, irrelevance) used in search engines. Second, it exhibits significant performance degradation when confronted with data distribution shift in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Distribution-Aware Robust Learning framework (DaRL) for relevance modeling in Alipay Search. Specifically, we design an effective loss function to enhance the discriminability of LLM-based relevance modeling across various fine-grained degrees of query-item relevance. To improve the generalizability of LLM-based relevance modeling, we first propose the Distribution-Aware Sample Augmentation (DASA) module. This module utilizes out-of-distribution (OOD) detection techniques to actively select appropriate samples that are not well covered by the original training set for model fine-tuning. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-stage fine-tuning strategy to simultaneously improve in-distribution (ID) and OOD performance, bridging the performance gap between them. DaRL has been deployed online to serve the Alipay's insurance product search...