A Self-Distilled Learning to Rank Model for <i>Ad Hoc</i> Retrieval
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Learning to rank models are broadly applied in ad hoc retrieval for scoring and sorting documents based on their relevance to textual queries. The generalizability of the trained model in the learning to rank approach, however, can have an impact on the retrieval performance, particularly when data includes noise and outliers, or is incorrectly collected or measured. In this paper, we introduce a Self-Distilled Learning to Rank (SDLR) framework for ad hoc retrieval, and analyze its performance over a range of retrieval datasets and also in the presence of features’ noise. SDLR assigns a confidence weight to each training sample, aiming at reducing the impact of noisy and outlier data in the training process. The confidence weight is approximated based on the feature’s distributions derived from the values observed for the features of the documents labeled for a query in a listwise training sample. SDLR includes a distillation process that facilitates passing on the underlying patterns in assigning confidence weights from the teacher model to the student one. We empirically illustrate that SDLR outperforms state-of-the-art learning to rank models in ad hoc retrieval. We thoroughly investigate the SDLR performance in different settings including when no distillation strategy is applied; when different portion of data are used for training the teacher and the student models, and when both teacher and student models are trained over identical data. We show that SDLR is more effective when training data are split between a teacher and a student model. We also show that SDLR’s performance is robust when data features are noisy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".