The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 25, 2026
Filed:
Sep. 26, 2024
Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc, Redmond, WA (US);
Tongfei Chen, Seattle, WA (US);
Adam David Pauls, San Francisco, CA (US);
Ankita Sharma, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Benjamin David Van Durme, Baltimore, MD (US);
Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A dense encoder is adapted as a hierarchical corpus encoder in an information retrieval system to use negative samples from sibling nodes in a hierarchical tree of vector embeddings for documents in a corpus. Both the encoder and hierarchical tree are co-trained using a loss function that takes the document hierarchy into account. The hierarchical corpus encoder may be used in both supervised training cases where query-document relevance judgments are present and in zero-shot cases where a query dataset is absent. The hierarchical corpus encoder demonstrates significant performance improvements over a variety of dense encoder and generative retrieval baselines, under both supervised and unsupervised scenarios, thereby establishing the effectiveness of jointly learning a document hierarchy.