Embedding Surgery: Localized Updates for Adaptive Ranking Correction in Dense Retrieval

Dense retrieval systems are core components of modern search engines, recommendation platforms, and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. They encode documents and queries into dense embeddings, enabling efficient semantic search via vector similarity. However, because document embeddings are computed offline and stored in static indexes, these systems struggle to adapt to user feedback or evolving search intent. To address this limitation, we introduce embedding surgery, a lightweight approach for adaptive ranking correction in dense retrieval. The method applies localized, minimal updates to selected document embeddings at query time, guided by editorial feedback, user interactions, or pseudo-labels from large language models. We formulate embedding surgery as a convex optimization problem that enforces ranking constraints while minimizing modifications to the affected document representations. We integrate embedding surgery into standard dense retrieval pipelines and evaluate it on TREC Deep Learning, TREC Robust, TREC CAsT, and MS MARCO benchmarks. Results show consistent improvements (e.g., up to +60.64% relative improvement in nDCG@10 on DL-Hard under editorial feedback), even under noisy or shifting feedback, with low computational cost and without disrupting the global structure of the embedding space. Extensive experiments show that ranking corrections propagate to semantically related queries and that embedding updates can be applied safely and efficiently to scalable Approximate Nearest Neighbor indexes via simple in-place overwriting, without requiring costly index reconstruction. Finally, embedding surgery complements query adaptation methods such as CoRocchio, yielding additional gains while being more robust to noisy feedback.