Minghao Qin

Chaofan Li, MingHao Qin, Shitao Xiao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) with decoder-only architectures demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. This feature enables them to effectively handle both familiar and novel tasks by utilizing examples provided within their input context. Recognizing the potential of this capability, we propose leveraging the ICL feature in LLMs to enhance the process of text embedding generation. To this end, we introduce a novel model bge-en-icl, which employs few-shot examples to produce high-quality text embeddings. Our approach integrates task-related examples directly into the query side, resulting in significant improvements across various tasks. Additionally, we have investigated how to effectively utilize LLMs as embedding models, including various attention mechanisms, pooling methods, etc. Our findings suggest that retaining the original framework often yields the best results, underscoring that simplicity is best. Experimental results on the MTEB and AIR-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our model, code and dataset are freely available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding .

Kun Luo, Minghao Qin, Zheng Liu et al.

Pretrained language models like BERT and T5 serve as crucial backbone encoders for dense retrieval. However, these models often exhibit limited generalization capabilities and face challenges in improving in domain accuracy. Recent research has explored using large language models (LLMs) as retrievers, achieving SOTA performance across various tasks. Despite these advancements, the specific benefits of LLMs over traditional retrievers and the impact of different LLM configurations, such as parameter sizes, pretraining duration, and alignment processes on retrieval tasks remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on a wide range of retrieval tasks, including in domain accuracy, data efficiency, zero shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction based retrieval, and multi task learning. We evaluate over 15 different backbone LLMs and non LLMs. Our findings reveal that larger models and extensive pretraining consistently enhance in domain accuracy and data efficiency. Additionally, larger models demonstrate significant potential in zero shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction based retrieval, and multi task learning. These results underscore the advantages of LLMs as versatile and effective backbone encoders in dense retrieval, providing valuable insights for future research and development in this field.

Huaying Yuan, Zheng Liu, Minghao Qin et al.

Efficient long-video understanding~(LVU) remains a challenging task in computer vision. Current long-context vision-language models~(LVLMs) suffer from information loss due to compression and brute-force downsampling. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods mitigate this issue, their applicability is limited due to explicit query dependency. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel memory-enhanced RAG-based approach called MemVid, which is inspired by the cognitive memory of human beings. Our approach operates in four basic steps: 1) memorizing holistic video information, 2) reasoning about the task's information needs based on memory, 3) retrieving critical moments based on the information needs, and 4) focusing on the retrieved moments to produce the final answer. To enhance the system's memory-grounded reasoning capabilities while achieving optimal end-to-end performance, we propose a curriculum learning strategy. This approach begins with supervised learning on well-annotated reasoning results, then progressively explores and reinforces more plausible reasoning outcomes through reinforcement learning. We perform extensive evaluations on popular LVU benchmarks, including MLVU, VideoMME and LVBench. In our experiments, MemVid demonstrates superior efficiency and effectiveness compared to both LVLMs and RAG methods.