Information Retrieval

Also known as IR

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Overview

Information retrieval develops methods for finding useful documents, passages, products, tables, code, and multimedia in response to a user's query. Systems range from lexical methods such as BM25 and learned sparse retrieval to dense embeddings, late-interaction models, hybrid ranking, and graph-based or agentic search. These methods support applications including web search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation, where retrieved evidence must be both relevant and sufficient for the task. A central challenge is balancing accuracy with speed and cost: semantic similarity can miss structured, compositional, or domain-specific evidence, and strong retrieval scores do not always lead to useful answers.

Latest papers

CardsList

476 papers61 papers in the last four weeks, up 36% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. Do We Need Bigger Models for Science? Task-Aware Retrieval with Small Language Models

    Apr 2, 2026Florian Kelber, Matthias Jobst, Yuni Susanti +1AI-Assisted Scientific ResearchRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    TU Dresden, Germany · FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany · ScaDS.AI, TU Dresden, Germany

  2. Transforming OPACs into Intelligent Discovery Systems: An AI-Powered, Knowledge Graph-Driven Smart OPAC for Digital Libraries

    Apr 1, 2026M. S. Rajeevan, B. Mini DeviLibrary and Information ScienceInformation Retrieval

    Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala, Trivandrum, India.

  3. PeopleSearchBench: Evaluating AI-Powered People Search Platforms with Criteria-Grounded Verification

    Mar 29, 2026Tianyu Shi, Wei Wang, Zequn Xie +10Web Search AgentsInformation Retrieval

  4. A Reference Architecture for Agentic Hybrid Retrieval in Dataset Search

    Mar 28, 2026Riccardo Terrenzi, Phongsakon Mark Konrad, Tim Lukas Adam +1Agentic RetrievalInformation Retrieval

    Centre for Industrial Software University of Southern Denmark Alsion 2, Sønderborg, 6400, Denmark

  5. Self-Describing Structured Data with Dual-Layer Guidance: A Lightweight Alternative to RAG for Precision Retrieval in Large-Scale LLM Knowledge Navigation

    Mar 28, 2026Hung Ming LiuLost-in-the-Middle EffectInformation Retrieval

    PARRAWA AI

  6. Sustainable Hybrid Document-Routed Retrieval for Financial RAG: Resolving the Robustness-Precision Trade-off

    Mar 26, 2026Zhiyuan Cheng, Longying Lai, Yue LiuRetrieval-Augmented GenerationFinancial QA

    School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · bSimon Business School, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA · cAccounting & Information Systems, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA

  7. GraphER: An Efficient Graph-Based Enrichment and Reranking Method for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Mar 26, 2026Ruizhong Miao, Yuying Wang, Rongguang Wang +4Multi-Hop RetrievalRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Oracle AI

  8. Evaluating Chunking Strategies For Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Oil and Gas Enterprise Documents

    Mar 25, 2026Samuel Taiwo, Mohd Amaluddin YusoffDocument ChunkingRAG Evaluation

    Digital and Innovation Department, Nigeria LNG Limited, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria

  9. Knowledge-Refined Dual Context-Aware Network for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

    Mar 25, 2026Junkai Yang, Qirui Wang, Yaoqing Jin +3Information RetrievalTemporal Video Grounding

    School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University · Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Universität Stuttgart

  10. Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

    Mar 24, 2026Qi Sun, Kejun Xiao, Huaipeng Zhao +2RL for IRInformation Retrieval

    Alibaba International Digital Commercial Group

  11. KARMA: Knowledge-Action Regularized Multimodal Alignment for Personalized Search at Taobao

    Mar 24, 2026Zhi Sun, Wenming Zhang, Yi Wei +4Information RetrievalPersonalized Language Model Alignment

    Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba, Hangzhou, China

  12. Retrieving Climate Change Disinformation by Narrative

    Mar 23, 2026Max Upravitelev, Veronika Solopova, Charlott Jakob +3Information RetrievalFake News Detection

    Technische Universität Berlin · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) · BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data +1

  13. On the Challenges and Opportunities of Learned Sparse Retrieval for Code

    Mar 23, 2026Simon Lupart, Maxime Louis, Thibault Formal +2Learned Sparse RetrievalInformation Retrieval

    NAVER LABS Europe

  14. Ontology-driven personalized information retrieval for XML documents

    Mar 22, 2026Ounnaci Iddir, Ahmed-ouamer Rachid, Tai DinhInformation RetrievalSemantic Search

    Research Laboratory in Computer Science (LARI), Department of Computer Science, Mouloud Mammeri University Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria · The Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics, 7 Tanaka Monzencho, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City, Kyoto, Japan

  15. What Tracks Hard-Negative Transfer? A Study of Lexical and Semantic Signals

    Mar 22, 2026Aarush Sinha, Rahul Seetharaman, Aman BansalInformation RetrievalHard Negative Mining

    University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark · Independent Researcher USA

  16. Errors in AI-Assisted Retrieval of Medical Literature: A Comparative Study

    Mar 21, 2026Jenny Gao, Yongfeng Zhang, Mary L Disis +1LLM ReliabilityBiomedical IR

    College of Arts and Science, New York University, New York, NY · College of Arts and Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003 · Department of Computer Sciences, School of Arts & Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ +9

  17. User Preference Modeling for Conversational LLM Agents: Weak Rewards from Retrieval-Augmented Interaction

    Mar 21, 2026Yuren Hao, Shuhaib Mehri, ChengXiang Zhai +1User Preference ModelingPreference Learning

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  18. ReBOL: Retrieval via Bayesian Optimization with Batched LLM Relevance Observations and Query Reformulation

    Mar 20, 2026Anton Korikov, Scott SannerInformation RetrievalLLM Reranking

    University of Toronto

  19. The End of Rented Discovery: How AI Search Redistributes Power Between Hotels and Intermediaries

    Mar 20, 2026Peiying Zhu, Sidi ChangE-Commerce SearchInformation Retrieval

    Blossom AI San Francisco, CA, USA

  20. CoverageBench: Evaluating Information Coverage across Tasks and Domains

    Mar 20, 2026Saron Samuel, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie +4Information RetrievalIR Evaluation

    Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

  21. Inducing Sustained Creativity and Diversity in Large Language Models

    Mar 19, 2026Queenie Luo, Gary King, Michael Puett +1Language Model DecodingDiverse Text Generation

    Ph.D. candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University · Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University · Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University +1

  22. Bypassing Document Ingestion: An MCP Approach to Financial Q&A

    Mar 19, 2026Sasan Mansouri, Edoardo Pilla, Mark Wahrenburg +1Financial QAModel Context Protocol

    University of Groningen · Goethe University Frankfurt · Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

  23. CodeScout: An Effective Recipe for Reinforcement Learning of Code Search Agents

    Mar 18, 2026Lintang Sutawika, Aditya Bharat Soni, Bharath Sriraam R R +8Code LocalizationCode Search

    Carnegie Mellon University · Independent · OpenHands

  24. PJB: A Reasoning-Aware Benchmark for Person-Job Retrieval

    Mar 18, 2026Guangzhi Wang, Xiaohui Yang, Kai Li +4Job-Candidate MatchingInformation Retrieval

    CareerInternational Research Team

  25. Answer Bubbles: Information Exposure in AI-Mediated Search

    Mar 17, 2026Michelle Huang, Agam Goyal, Koustuv Saha +1Generative RetrievalInformation Retrieval

    Siebel School of Computing and Data Science University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

  26. AgriIR: A Scalable Framework for Domain-Specific Knowledge Retrieval

    Mar 17, 2026Shuvam Banerji Seal, Aheli Poddar, Alok Mishra +1Retrieval-Augmented GenerationInformation Retrieval

    Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, India · Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata, India

  27. Training for Compositional Sensitivity Reduces Dense Retrieval Generalization

    Mar 16, 2026Radoslav Ralev, Aditeya Baral, Iliya Zhechev +2Information RetrievalDense Retrieval

    Redis, Bulgaria and Redis, USA

  28. A Framework and Prototype for a Navigable Map of Datasets in Engineering Design and Systems Engineering

    Mar 16, 2026H. Sinan Bank, Daniel R. HerberDataset DiscoveryInformation Retrieval

    Department of Systems Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523

  29. Compute Allocation for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval Agents

    Mar 15, 2026Sreeja Apparaju, Nilesh GuptaInference-Time Compute AllocationInformation Retrieval

  30. AMES: Approximate Multi-modal Enterprise Search via Late Interaction Retrieval

    Mar 13, 2026Tony Joseph, Carlos Pareja, David Lopes Pegna +1Multimodal IRInformation Retrieval

    Apple, Cupertino, CA, USA