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Retrieval Capabilities of Large Language Models Scale with Pretraining FLOPs

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arxiv 2508.17400 v1 pith:LGEISFML submitted 2025-08-24 cs.LG cs.AIcs.IR

Retrieval Capabilities of Large Language Models Scale with Pretraining FLOPs

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.IR
keywords retrievalflopsperformanceacrossbillionparameterspretrainingscale
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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How does retrieval performance scale with pretraining FLOPs? We benchmark retrieval performance across LLM model sizes from 125 million parameters to 7 billion parameters pretrained on datasets ranging from 1 billion tokens to more than 2 trillion tokens. We find that retrieval performance on zero-shot BEIR tasks predictably scales with LLM size, training duration, and estimated FLOPs. We also show that In-Context Learning scores are strongly correlated with retrieval scores across retrieval tasks. Finally, we highlight the implications this has for the development of LLM-based retrievers.

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