arXiv:2601.21049cs.AI2026-01

让检索模型在模糊查询下仍能准确定位目标,无需重新训练。

QUARK: Robust Retrieval under Non-Faithful Queries via Query-Anchored Aggregation

  • 通过构建多个可能的原始意图假设,显式建模查询不确定性。
  • 在多个数据集上提升召回率、MRR和nDCG,效果优于基础检索器。
  • 适合实际应用中查询不完整或有噪声的场景,如搜索、问答系统。

真实场景中的用户查询常为非忠实查询(含噪声、不完整或失真),导致检索器因关键语义缺失而失效。本文将此问题形式化为回忆噪声下的检索,其中观察到的查询来自潜在目标项的噪声回忆过程。为此提出QUARK,一种无需训练的鲁棒检索框架。QUARK通过恢复假设(即给定观测查询下多个合理的原始意图解释)显式建模查询不确定性,并引入查询锚定聚合机制,以原查询为语义锚点,融合辅助假设信号,防止语义漂移和假设劫持。该设计在不牺牲鲁棒性的前提下,显著提升召回与排序质量,即使部分假设存在噪声或无效。在控制模拟及BEIR基准(FIQA、SciFact、NFCorpus)上的实验表明,无论稀疏还是稠密检索器,QUARK均优于基线模型。消融实验验证其对恢复假设数量具有鲁棒性,且锚定聚合优于无锚的max/mean/median池化。结果表明,通过恢复假设建模查询不确定性,并结合有原则的锚定聚合,是实现非忠实查询下鲁棒检索的关键。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

User queries in real-world retrieval are often non-faithful (noisy, incomplete, or distorted), causing retrievers to fail when key semantics are missing. We formalize this as retrieval under recall noise, where the observed query is drawn from a noisy recall process of a latent target item. To address this, we propose QUARK, a simple yet effective training-free framework for robust retrieval under non-faithful queries. QUARK explicitly models query uncertainty through recovery hypotheses, i.e., multiple plausible interpretations of the latent intent given the observed query, and introduces query-anchored aggregation to combine their signals robustly. The original query serves as a semantic anchor, while recovery hypotheses provide controlled auxiliary evidence, preventing semantic drift and hypothesis hijacking. This design enables QUARK to improve recall and ranking quality without sacrificing robustness, even when some hypotheses are noisy or uninformative. Across controlled simulations and BEIR benchmarks (FIQA, SciFact, NFCorpus) with both sparse and dense retrievers, QUARK improves Recall, MRR, and nDCG over the base retriever. Ablations show QUARK is robust to the number of recovery hypotheses and that anchored aggregation outperforms unanchored max/mean/median pooling. These results demonstrate that modeling query uncertainty through recovery hypotheses, coupled with principled anchored aggregation, is essential for robust retrieval under non-faithful queries.

信息检索鲁棒性查询理解

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