SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE
Carlos Lassance Hervé Déjean Thibault Formal Stéphane Clinchant
A companion to the release of the latest version of the SPLADE library. We
describe changes to the training structure and present our latest series of
models -- SPLADE-v3. We compare this new version to BM25, SPLADE++, as well as
re-rankers, and showcase its effectiveness via a meta-analysis over more than
40 query sets. SPLADE-v3 further pushes the limit of SPLADE models: it is
statistically significantly more effective than both BM25 and SPLADE++, while
comparing well to cross-encoder re-rankers. Specifically, it gets more than 40
MRR@10 on the MS MARCO dev set, and improves by 2% the out-of-domain results on
the BEIR benchmark.