Papers › On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models

On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models

25 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.18768archive 2025-07-28

Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Changjiang Zhou, Maarten de Rijke, Xueqi Cheng

Generative information retrieval methods retrieve documents by directly generating their identifiers. Much effort has been devoted to developing effective generative IR models. Less attention has been paid to the robustness of these models. It is critical to assess the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of generative IR models, i.e., how would such models generalize to new distributions? To answer this question, we focus on OOD scenarios from four perspectives in retrieval problems: (i)query variations; (ii)unseen query types; (iii)unseen tasks; and (iv)corpus expansion. Based on this taxonomy, we conduct empirical studies to analyze the OOD robustness of representative generative IR models against dense retrieval models. Our empirical results indicate that the OOD robustness of generative IR models is in need of improvement. By inspecting the OOD robustness of generative IR models we aim to contribute to the development of more reliable IR models. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Davion-Liu/GR_OOD}.

PaperPDFCode

Code

davion-liu/gr_ood officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Information RetrievalRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionFocusSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections