Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers

Abstract

It has been shown that dual encoders trained on one domain often fail to generalize to other domains for retrieval tasks. One widespread belief is that the bottleneck layer of a dual encoder, where the final score is simply a dot-product between a query vector and a passage vector, is too limited compared to models with fine-grained interactions between the query and the passage. In this paper, we challenge this belief by scaling up the size of the dual encoder model while keeping the bottleneck layer as a single dot-product with a fixed size. With multi-stage training, scaling up the model size brings significant improvement on a variety of retrieval tasks, especially for out-of-domain generalization. We further analyze the impact of the bottleneck layer and demonstrate diminishing improvement when scaling up the embedding size. Experimental results show that our dual encoders, Generalizable T5-based dense Retrievers (GTR), outperform previous sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. Most surprisingly, our ablation study finds that GTR is very data efficient, as it only needs 10% of MS Marco supervised data to match the out-of-domain performance of using all supervised data.