# GeAR: Generation Augmented Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02772 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02772/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06967/) (2021)
- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07033/) (2021)
- [BERT Post-Training for Review Reading Comprehension and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02232/) (2019)
- [Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17419/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document retrieval techniques are essential for developing large-scale information systems. The common approach involves using a bi-encoder to compute the semantic similarity between a query and documents. However, the scalar similarity often fail to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. In addition, this process primarily focuses on global semantics, overlooking the finer-grained semantic relationships between the query and the document's content. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, Generation Augmented Retrieval (GeAR), which not only improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning, but also integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. This enables GeAR to generate relevant context within the documents based on a given query, facilitating learning to retrieve local fine-grained information. Furthermore, when used as a retriever, GeAR does not incur any additional computational cost over bi-encoders. GeAR exhibits competitive retrieval performance across diverse scenarios and tasks. Moreover, qualitative analysis and the results generated by GeAR provide novel insights into the interpretation of retrieval results. The code, data, and models will be released at hrefhttps://github.com/microsoft/LMOpshttps://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.