Resource Efficient Adaptive Retrieval

Master Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

M.J.P. Smits (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Contributor(s)

A. Anand – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)

L.J.L. Leonhardt – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)

Julián Urbano – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)

Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Graduation Date
07-05-2025
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
['Computer Science']
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
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Abstract

Adaptive retrieval is a technique to overcome the recall limitations of two-stage retrieval pipelines. Adaptive retrieval focuses mainly on effectiveness, but shows potential to improve efficiency. This research focuses on the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency in adaptive retrieval. We explore the behaviour of neighbourhoods formed by the corpus graph, find that the effectiveness of adaptive retrieval varies across queries, and identify the most effective way to leverage the corpus graph. We investigate the impact of two different scoring mechanisms on the efficiency and effectiveness of an adaptive retrieval pipeline. We observe that score interpolation tends to improve adaptive retrieval's effectiveness, and incorporating an additional cross-encoder stage can lead to further gains. We compare our proposed solutions against several baselines to examine the trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency. In our setting, we find that adaptive retrieval can improve efficiency at the cost of effectiveness. For our experiments, we introduce a visualisation tool for graph exploration and an adaptive retrieval component for efficient retrieval pipelines.

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