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Andrew Drozdov

@mrdrozdov.com
5.4K followers 611 following 185 posts

Search and Agents @ Databricks

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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 23/09/2026
So many cool papers this week, and it's only Tuesday.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 22/09/2026
This week I'll have a long talk with @yacinemahdid.bsky.social about KARL and all things retrieval, and couldn't be looking forward to it more. substack.com/@yacinelearn...
substack.com
Yacine Mahdid (@yacinelearning)
I'll have the pleasure this week to interview andrew drozdov senior research scientist at databricks on all things retrievals like: - RL for knowledge agents (see KARL) - learning representation pro...
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 19/08/2025
We built a thing! The Databricks Reranker is now in Public Preview. It's as easy as changing the arguments to your vector search call, and doesn't require any additional setup. Read more: www.databricks.com/blog/reranki...
databricks.com
Reranking in Mosaic AI Vector Search for Faster, Smarter Retrieval in RAG Agents
Boost RAG agent quality with reranking—deliver more relevant answers in less time with a single parameter in Mosaic AI Vector Search.
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
The transformer was invented in Google. RLHF was not invented in industry labs, but came to prominence in OpenAI and DeepMind. I took 5 of the most influential papers (black dots) and visualized their references. Blue dots are papers that acknowledge federal funding (DARPA, NSF).
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Florina Piroi @flrp.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
LongEval is turning three this year! This is a Call for Participation to our CLEF 2025 Lab - try out how your IR system does in the long term. Check the details on our page: clef-longeval.github.io
clef-longeval.github.io
LongEval 2025
Conference Template
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 13/04/2025
The PhD is pretraining. Interview prep is alignment. Take this to heart. :)
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Marzena Karpinska @markar.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
We have updated #nocha, a leaderboard for reasoning over long-context narratives 📖, with some new models including #Gemini 2.5 Pro which shows massive improvements over the previous version! Congrats to #Gemini team 🪄 🧙 Check 🔗 novelchallenge.github.io for details :)
Leaderboard showing performance of language models on claim verification task over book-length input. o1-preview is the best model with 67.36% accuracy followed by Gemini 2.5 Pro with 64.17% accuracy.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 22/03/2025
Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of retrieval: For a context to be relevant, it is not enough for it to improve the probability of the right answer.
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Daniel Liden @danliden.com · 14/03/2025
MLflow is on BlueSky! Follow @mlflow.org to keep up to date on new releases, blogs and tutorials, events, and more.
bsky.app
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 12/03/2025
One, and two, and three police persons spring out of the shadows Down the corner comes one more And we scream into that city night: “three plus one makes four!” Well, they seem to think we’re disturbing the peace But we won’t let them make us sad ’Cause kids like you and me baby, we were born to add
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 11/03/2025
"How Claude Code is using a 50-Year-Old trick to revolutionize programming"
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 11/03/2025
Somehow my most controversial take of 2025 is that agents relying on grep are a form of RAG.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 26/02/2025
It was a real pleasure talking about effective IR approaches with Brooke and Denny on the Data Brew podcast. Among other things, I'm excited about embedding finetuning and reranking as modular ways to improve RAG pipelines. Everyone should use these more!
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 26/02/2025
We're probably a little too obsessed with zero-shot retrieval. If you have documents (you do), then you can generate synthetic data, and finetune your embedding. Blog post lead by @jacobianneuro.bsky.social shows how well this works in practice. www.databricks.com/blog/improvi...
databricks.com
Improving Retrieval and RAG with Embedding Model Finetuning
Fine-tune embedding models on Databricks to enhance retrieval and RAG accuracy with synthetic data—no manual labeling required.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 01/02/2025
I do want to see aggregate stats about the model’s generation and total reasoning tokens is perhaps the least informative one.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 26/01/2025
"All you need to build a strong reasoning model is the right data mix." The pipeline that creates the data mix:
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 22/01/2025
Using 100+ tokens to answer 2 + 3 =
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 27/12/2024
It’s pretty obvious we’re in a local minima for pretraining. Would expect more breakthroughs in the 5-10 year range. Granted, it’s still incredibly hard and expensive to do good research in this space, despite the number of labs working on it.
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Susie Dent @susiedentwords.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Word of the day (of course) is ‘scurryfunging’, from US dialect: the frantic attempt to tidy the house just before guests arrive.
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kyunghyuncho.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
... didn't know this would be one of the hottest takes i've had ... for more on my thoughts, see drive.google.com/file/d/1sk_t...
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kyunghyuncho.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
feeling a but under the weather this week … thus an increased level of activity on social media and blog: kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anx...
kyunghyuncho.me
i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS’24 – Kyunghyun Cho
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Sumit @reachsumit.com · 20/12/2024
Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference Introduces ModernBERT, a bidirectional encoder advancing BERT-like models with 8K context length. 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2412.13663 👨🏽‍💻 github.com/AnswerDotAI/...
arxiv.org
Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference
Encoder-only transformer models such as BERT offer a great performance-size tradeoff for retrieval and classification tasks with respect to larger decoder-only models. Despite being the workhorse of n...
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Sumit @reachsumit.com · 20/12/2024
State Space Models are Strong Text Rerankers Shows Mamba-based models achieve comparable reranking performance to transformers while being more memory efficient, with Mamba-2 outperforming Mamba-1. 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2412.14354
arxiv.org
State Space Models are Strong Text Rerankers
Transformers dominate NLP and IR; but their inference inefficiencies and challenges in extrapolating to longer contexts have sparked interest in alternative model architectures. Among these, state spa...
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Matthew Kollmer @matthewkollmer.com · 19/12/2024
I’m being facetious, but the truth behind the joke is that OCR correction opens up the possibility (and futility) of language much like drafting poetry. For every interpreted pattern for optimizing OCR correction, exceptions arise. So, too, with patterns in poetry.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 17/12/2024
Reasoning is fascinating but confusing. Is reasoning a task? Or is reasoning a method for generating answers, for any task?
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Will Whitney @wfwhitney.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
The future of AI is models that generate graphical interfaces. Instead of the linear, low-bandwidth metaphor of conversation, models will represent themselves to us as computers: rich visuals, direct manipulation, and instant feedback. willwhitney.com/computing-in...
willwhitney.com
Computing inside an AI | Will Whitney
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Science News @scinews.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 14/12/2024
In any given year there are between one and three Friday the 13ths. This year there are two. 👻
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Jonathan Frankle @jfrankle.com · 13/12/2024
Reflections on NeurIPS: There's always a big theme people seem to be preoccupied with. This year, it was the continuation of scaling/progress. Will it continue? What will the next generation of models hold? I even got to sass Dylan Patel (not on bsky) over it. Here are my personal thoughts 🧵
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Cody Blakeney ✈️ NeurIPS 2024 @codestar.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
The databricks have arrived
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 09/12/2024
Slides are up! I presented on "Presentation & Consumption in the context of REML" The full deck is here. There's a lot of gems if you're interested in this space! retrieval-enhanced-ml.github.io/sigir-ap2024...
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 09/12/2024
Today we'll be presenting the Tutorial on Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML). Come by to learn about the emerging design patterns in this space and see how to use retrieval beyond RAG. In collaboration w/ the amazing @841io.bsky.social @teknology.bsky.social Alireza Salemi and Hamed Zamani.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 09/12/2024
Today we'll be presenting the Tutorial on Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML). Come by to learn about the emerging design patterns in this space and see how to use retrieval beyond RAG. In collaboration w/ the amazing @841io.bsky.social @teknology.bsky.social Alireza Salemi and Hamed Zamani.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 06/12/2024
Few things that are revolutionizing retrieval research right now: 1. content-based models have gotten much better 2. synthetic data has increased the value of small specialized datasets 3. retrieval is becoming a more important component in a variety of AI applications
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 06/12/2024
Reading articles that 🦋 might get into advertising, and I'm not sure this is what they meant 😅
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 06/12/2024
Seen in NYC
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 05/12/2024
2024: For really hard problems, you go to that one friend down the street who has an o1 pro subscription. 1960: For really important calls, you go to that one friend down the street who was able to get a telephone.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 05/12/2024
👀
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 05/12/2024
Somehow missed this thread from @sungkim.bsky.social --- thanks for the interest in our work!
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Akari Asai @akariasai.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
I’m on the academic job market this year! I’m completing my @uwcse.bsky.social @uwnlp.bsky.social Ph.D. (2025), focusing on overcoming LLM limitations like hallucinations, by building new LMs. My Ph.D. work focuses on Retrieval-Augmented LMs to create more reliable AI systems 🧵
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 04/12/2024
RAG still has a way to go. (this book doesn’t exist)
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 03/12/2024
An underlooked feature of arXiv is it provides a unified interface for all the conferences.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 03/12/2024
Every individual agent is just a sparse instantiation of the mother agent that represents all agents.
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
Social media idea where you wouldn't need verification: Identity Roleplay 1. Bootstrap the network by adding 1000s or millions of profiles. 2. Users get assigned random-ish accounts for a temporary time. Like, you'd get to publish a few posts as Hugh Jackman before rotating to someone else. 3. ...
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
Creating a slide and applying a layout is now two separate steps on Google Slides. (you have to right-click the slide after creation to change the layout)
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
Swapneel's guide to writing an SoP is so good. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
So you Want Me to Review your Essays
So you Want Me to Review your Essays? Instructions: Read this blog post: https://mehtaver.se/how-to-write-a-statement-of-purpose-for-grad-school Review this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c...
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
You should probably follow Sumit. One of the better sources for IR papers here.
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Yoav Artzi @yoavartzi.com · 02/12/2024
I am seriously behind uploading Learning Machines videos, but I did want to get @jonathanberant.bsky.social's out sooner than later. It's not only a great talk, it also gives a remarkably broad overview and contextualization, so it's an excellent way to ramp up on post-training youtu.be/2AthqCX3h8U
youtu.be
Jonathan Berant (Tel Aviv University / Google) / Towards Robust Language Model Post-training
YouTube video by Yoav Artzi
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
Fast science is one thing, but I'm seeing multiple people who have papers published in 2025! Is this future science? Time travel science?
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Andrew Drozdov @mrdrozdov.com · 02/12/2024
It wasn't even the transformer paper that was first to show attention was all you need. Everyone forgets how aggressively folks were working on faster alternatives to RNNs ~2016, and another paper from Google did a pure attention model first: arxiv.org/abs/1606.01933
arxiv.org
A Decomposable Attention Model for Natural Language Inference
We propose a simple neural architecture for natural language inference. Our approach uses attention to decompose the problem into subproblems that can be solved separately, thus making it trivially pa...
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