arXiv:2605.00560cs.IR2026-05中稿 · SIGIR 26 full pape…

通过在线选择优化查询改写,提升召回率同时抑制结果漂移。

When More Reformulations Hurt: Avoiding Drift using Ranker Feedback

  • 将改写查询作为特征,用轻量代理模型评估文档价值
  • 在固定重排预算下,动态优先处理高质量改写与文档
  • 适合需要高效高召回的检索系统,尤其改写数量多时

现代检索系统依赖查询改写与神经重排提升效果,但带来高昂计算成本和召回率与查询漂移之间的根本权衡。生成大量改写查询可显著提高召回率,但盲目合并或穷举重排结果代价过高。本文提出ReformIR,一种预算感知的检索框架,将查询改写视为第一类特征,利用强重排器作为教师模型进行在线相关性估计。面对多个改写查询,ReformIR构建大规模候选池,并训练轻量级代理模型,从改写特定的检索信号中估计文档效用。在固定重排预算下,该代理模型自适应优先处理改写与文档,仅选择性调用锚定于原始查询的教师重排器。此过程在提升召回率的同时,通过在线特征选择主动抑制漂移。在MSMARCO段落语料库和TREC深度学习基准(DL19-DL22)上广泛实验表明,ReformIR持续优于现有改写策略,尤其当改写数量增加时,传统方法因漂移导致质量严重下降。研究建议:与其用大语言模型作重排器,不如将其能力用于改写阶段,通过反馈驱动优化。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Modern retrieval pipelines increasingly rely on query reformulation and neural reranking to improve effectiveness, but this comes at a significant computational cost and introduces a fundamental tradeoff between recall and query drift. Generating many reformulated queries can substantially increase recall, yet naively merging or exhaustively reranking their results is prohibitively expensive. In this work, we argue that the core challenge is not reformulation generation itself, but the adaptive selection of reformulations and their retrieved documents under a strict inference budget. We propose ReformIR, a budget-aware retrieval framework that treats query reformulations as first-class features and performs online relevance estimation using a strong reranker as a teacher. Given multiple reformulated queries, ReformIR constructs a large candidate pool and learns a lightweight surrogate model that estimates document utility from reformulation-specific retrieval signals. Under a fixed reranking budget, the surrogate adaptively prioritizes both reformulations and documents, selectively querying a teacher reranker anchored to the original query. This process increases recall while actively suppressing drift through online feature selection over reformulations. We conduct extensive experiments on the MSMARCO passage corpora and TREC Deep Learning benchmarks (DL19-DL22). Our results show that ReformIR consistently outperforms existing reformulation strategies, particularly as the number of reformulations increases, where prior methods suffer from severe quality degradation due to drift. Our findings also suggest a shift in retrieval system design, rather than using large language models as rerankers, their capacity is more effectively leveraged in the reformulation stage with feedback-driven optimization.

信息检索查询改写重排序效率优化

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