Contrastive Learning Falls Short: Improving Dense Retrieval with Cross-Encoder Listwise Distillation and Synthetic Data.

@inproceedings{tamber-2026-contrastive, author = {Manveer Singh Tamber and Suleman Kazi and Vivek Sourabh and Jimmy Lin}, editor = {Ricardo Campos and Adam Jatowt and Yanyan Lan and Mohammad Aliannejadi and Christine Bauer and Sean MacAvaney and Avishek Anand and Zhaochun Ren and Suzan Verberne and Nan Bai and Masoud Mansoury}, title = {{Contrastive Learning Falls Short: Improving Dense Retrieval with Cross-Encoder Listwise Distillation and Synthetic Data}}, booktitle = {{Advances in Information Retrieval - 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, Delft, The Netherlands, March 29 - April 2, 2026, Proceedings, Part II}}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, volume = {16484}, pages = {104--121}, publisher = {Springer}, year = {2026}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-21300-6_7}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-21300-6_7} }