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Abstract - The Wisdom of Many Queries: Complexity-Diversity Principle for Dense Retriever Training
Prior work reports conflicting results on query diversity in synthetic data generation for dense retrieval. We identify this conflict and design Q-D metrics to quantify diversity's impact, making the problem measurable. Through experiments on 4 benchmark types (31 datasets), we find query diversity especially benefits multi-hop retrieval. Deep analysis on multi-hop data reveals that diversity benefit correlates strongly with query complexity ($r$$\geq$0.95, $p$$<$0.05 in 12/14 conditions), measured by content words (CW). We formalize this as the Complexity-Diversity Principle (CDP): query complexity determines optimal diversity. CDP provides actionable thresholds (CW$>$10: use diversity; CW$<$7: avoid it). Guided by CDP, we propose zero-shot multi-query synthesis for multi-hop tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
多查询的智慧:稠密检索器训练的复杂度-多样性原则 /
The Wisdom of Many Queries: Complexity-Diversity Principle for Dense Retriever Training
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文发现,在训练稠密检索模型时,使用多样化的合成查询是否有益,取决于查询本身的复杂程度:对于复杂查询(如多步推理问题),多样性至关重要;而对于简单查询,多样性反而有害,并据此提出了一个可操作的指导原则和新的数据合成方法,在多步推理任务上取得了领先效果。