Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins

Lukas Gienapp; Niklas Deckers; Martin Potthast; Harrisen Scells

doi:10.1145/3731120.3744594

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arXiv · 2407.21515

Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins

Lukas Gienapp·Niklas Deckers·Martin Potthast·Harrisen Scells

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Abstract

Representation-based retrieval models, so-called bi-encoders, estimate the relevance of a document to a query by calculating the similarity of their respective embeddings. Current state-of-the-art bi-encoders are trained using an expensive training regime involving knowledge distillation from a teacher model and batch-sampling. Instead of relying on a teacher model, we contribute a novel parameter-free loss function for self-supervision that exploits the pre-trained language modeling capabilities of the encoder model as a training signal, eliminating the need for batch sampling by performing implicit hard negative mining. We investigate the capabilities of our proposed approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating that self-distillation can match the effectiveness of teacher distillation using only 13.5% of the data, while offering a speedup in training time between 3x and 15x compared to parametrized losses. All code and data is made openly available.

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Lukas Gienapp, Niklas Deckers, Martin Potthast, Harrisen Scells. 2025-06-20. Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins. https://doi.org/10.1145/3731120.3744594

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