xPRT: Cross-Passage Retrieval Pretraining

Abstract

Dense retrievers are a foundational component underlying modern RAG and search systems. Training these models typically requires a curated collection of annotated query-document pairs, which are prohibitively expensive to obtain outside a handful of well-resourced domains. This has motivated a line of work that leverages large-scale unsupervised retrieval pretraining from unlabelled text alone. Most such methods learn by optimizing a language modelling or contrastive learning objective over short spans within a document. This raises the question: how can we extract richer learning signals from a single document for retrieval pretraining? To address it, we introduce xPRT (Cross-Passage Retrieval Pretraining), an unsupervised framework that learns from the key information distributed across an entire document and the connections between its parts. We evaluate xPRT against five state-of-the-art objectives on MTEB English v2, continuing pretraining from a public unsupervised checkpoint while holding the corpus, schedule, and training procedure fixed. Across diverse tasks spanning all task types, we observe that xPRT consistently outperforms the strongest baseline by 3.2% on an average. Notably, in this continual pretraining setting, many baseline methods incur substantial performance regressions, whereas our method delivers the largest complementary gains over the initial pretrained checkpoint. Controlled ablations confirm that xPRT's performance gains stem from its proposed cross-passage signals. xPRT demonstrates that a single unlabelled document is a much richer source of retrieval signal than prior work assumed and offers complementary gains to what current retrievers already capture.