RICE: training-free dense retrieval from LLMs using only in-context examples

_reachsumit · x · 2026-09-30

A University of Waterloo team (Nour Jedidi, Jimmy Lin et al.) introduces RICE (Representations from In-Context Examples), a training-free method that turns decoder-only LLMs into strong dense retrievers. By conditioning the LLM on a few query-document examples, RICE gives query and document encodings a shared context, substantially improving prompt-based LLM embedding accuracy. Code is open-sourced, offering a simple path to training-free LLM-based dense retrievers.

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