2 papers
cs.IR2026
From Tokens to Concepts: Leveraging SAE for SPLADE
Yuxuan Zong, Mathias Vast, Basile Van Cooten +2
Learned Sparse IR models, such as SPLADE, offer an excellent efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. However, they rely on the underlying backbone vocabulary, which might hinder perform…
cs.IR2026
Building Better Encoder-only Cross-Encoders: A Controlled Study of Training Strategies for Neural Re-ranking
Victor Morand, Mathias Vast, Basile Van Cooten +3
Cross-encoders fine-tuned from Transformer backbones remain the standard for second-stage re-ranking, and recent knowledge-distillation strategies have closed much of the gap with…