Learning Refined Document Representations for Dense Retrieval via Deliberate Thinking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12974v2
• Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2025 10:55:30 GMT
• Title: Learning Refined Document Representations for Dense Retrieval via Deliberate Thinking
• Authors: Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shi Yu, Yishan Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun,
• Abstract summary: Deliberate Thinking based Retriever (Debater) is a novel approach that enhances document representations by incorporating a step-by-step thinking process.<n>Debater significantly outperforms existing methods across several retrieval benchmarks.
• Score: 58.69615583599489
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent dense retrievers increasingly leverage the robust text understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encoding queries and documents into a shared embedding space for effective retrieval. However, most existing methods represent each document with a single embedding, which is less effective at capturing its multifaceted semantics and thereby limits matching accuracy. In this paper, we propose Deliberate Thinking based Dense Retriever (Debater), a novel approach that enhances document representations by incorporating a step-by-step thinking process. Debater introduces a Chain-of-Deliberation mechanism, which iteratively refines document embeddings through a continuous chain-of-thought. To integrate information from various thinking steps, Debater further employs a Self Distillation mechanism that identifies and fuses the most informative steps into a unified embedding. Experimental results show that Debater significantly outperforms existing methods across several retrieval benchmarks, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/DEBATER.

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