Paper

ECI: Effective Contrastive Information to Evaluate Hard-Negatives

arXiv:2603.20990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hard-negative source selection for dense retrieval is usually decided only after fine-tuning and downstream evaluation. We propose Effective Contrastive Information (ECI), a training-free diagnostic that ranks candidate negative sources using frozen target-encoder embeddings. ECI is training-free, not label-free: each scored example requires a query, a labeled positive, and an explicit candidate negative. $\mathrm{ECI}_{\mathrm{sem}}$ builds a weighted residual information matrix from target consistency, semantic locality, lexical residualit…

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