Towards Explaining Query Expansion Performance in Information Retrieval
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by generating document-like passages. In hybrid retrieval, however, most evaluations fuse fixed top-$L$ dense and sparse rankings. Because the cutoff contr...
The paper evaluates how robust large language models (LLMs) are when using retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) in practical settings. It investigates whether RAG always outperforms non‑RAG approaches, whether adding more retrieved documents helps, and whether the order of documents matters, using a benchmark of 1,891 samples across five datasets and three task categories. Experiments with 11 LLMs show generally high retrieval robustness, but performance varies by task and prompting strategy, indicating that adopting RAG should be considered on a case‑by‑case basis.
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
The paper investigates how adding non‑relevant documents to a collection affects the performance of Information Retrieval (IR) models. It distinguishes between Multi‑Document‑Agnostic (MDA) models, which do not rely on other documents, and Multi‑Document‑Dependent (MDD) models, which do, and evaluates both on two collections with little topic overlap. Results show that all models suffer some performance loss when non‑relevant documents are added, but MDA models outperform MDD models in retrieval tasks, while both perform similarly in reranking.
arXiv:2609.14016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TF-IDF and BM25 are two of the most widely used methods for scoring query-document relevance, yet neither has a standard probabilistic derivation tha...
arXiv:2605. 06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented agents are increasingly the interface to large knowledge bases, yet most treat retrieval as a black box: they issue exploratory queries, inspect snippets, and reformulate until evidence emerges.