Aligning LLMs with Sparse Retrieval via Adaptive Sparse Supervision

Abstract

While large language models (LLMs) offer strong semantic representations, their application to first-stage retrieval incurs substantial latency and storage costs. Neural sparse retrievers such as SPLADE provide efficient retrieval but rely on relatively compact encoders with limited representational capacity. To bridge this gap, we propose an LLM-based sparse retrieval framework with input-adaptive sparse alignment. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic $α$-truncation strategy that selects input-specific supervision supports based on the cumulative activation mass of SPLADE representations. This strategy guides the LLM to preserve salient lexical signals while suppressing less informative activations, without relying on a fixed support budget. Subsequent retrieval fine-tuning combines contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, and sparsity regularization to improve retrieval effectiveness. Experiments on MS MARCO and six selected BEIR datasets demonstrate improvements over SPLADE++ while maintaining competitive effectiveness against LLM-based sparse retrievers. Compared with Lion-sp, our method reduces index storage by 6.4-fold and end-to-end query latency by over 11-fold, achieving a favorable effectiveness-efficiency trade-off.