SoftQE: Learned Representations of Queries Expanded by LLMs

We investigate the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into query encoders to improve dense retrieval without increasing latency and cost, by circumventing the dependency on LLMs at inference time. SoftQE incorporates knowledge from LLMs by mapping embeddings of input queries to those of the LLM-expanded queries. While improvements over various strong baselines on in-domain MS-MARCO metrics are marginal, SoftQE improves performance by 2.83 absolute percentage points on average on five out-of-domain BEIR tasks.

Accelerating Gradient-based Meta Learner

Meta Learning has been in focus in recent years due to the meta-learner model's ability to adapt well and generalize to new tasks, thus, reducing both the time and data requirements for learning. However, a major drawback of meta learner is that, to reach to a state from where learning new tasks becomes feasible with less data, it requires a large number of iterations and a lot of time. We address this issue by proposing various acceleration techniques to speed up meta learning algorithms such as MAML (Model Agnostic Meta Learning). We present 3.73X acceleration on a well known RNN optimizer based meta learner proposed in literature [11]. We introduce a novel method of training tasks in clusters, which not only accelerates the meta learning process but also improves model accuracy performance. Keywords: Meta learning, RNN optimizer, AGI, Performance optimization

CBIR using Pre-Trained Neural Networks

Much of the recent research work in image retrieval, has been focused around using Neural Networks as the core component. Many of the papers in other domain have shown that training multiple models, and then combining their outcomes, provide good results. This is since, a single Neural Network model, may not extract sufficient information from the input. In this paper, we aim to follow a different approach. Instead of the using a single model, we use a pretrained Inception V3 model, and extract activation of its last fully connected layer, which forms a low dimensional representation of the image. This feature matrix, is then divided into branches and separate feature extraction is done for each branch, to obtain multiple features flattened into a vector. Such individual vectors are then combined, to get a single combined feature. We make use of CUB200-2011 Dataset, which comprises of 200 birds classes to train the model on. We achieved a training accuracy of 99.46% and validation accuracy of 84.56% for the same. On further use of 3 branched global descriptors, we improve the validation accuracy to 88.89%. For this, we made use of MS-RMAC feature extraction method.