Improving Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Neural Rerankers with Contextualized Late Interaction
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Recent progress in information retrieval finds that embedding query and document representation into multi-vector yields a robust bi-encoder retriever on out-of-distribution datasets. In this paper, we explore whether late interaction, the simplest form of multi-vector, is also helpful to neural rerankers that only use the [CLS] vector to compute the similarity score. Although intuitively, the attention mechanism of rerankers at the previous layers already gathers the token-level information, we find adding late interaction still brings an extra 5 out-of-distribution datasets, with little increase in latency and no degradation in in-domain effectiveness. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that the finding is consistent across different model sizes and first-stage retrievers of diverse natures and that the improvement is more prominent on longer queries.
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