Neural information retrieval (IR) models’ capacity to understand and extract relevant data in response to user queries has significantly improved, thanks to recent developments. This has made these models highly effective across different IR tasks. Nevertheless, for their reliable practical application, attention needs to be paid to their robustness, which means their ability to function consistently in a variety of unforeseen situations. This factor has lately gained considerable prominence in research.
The resilience of neural inference models is critical for their continued performance in real-world circumstances. They need to efficiently handle out-of-distribution (OOD) situations, protect against adversarial attacks, reduce performance variance across requests, and provide reliable outcomes. Robustness in IR models involves these aspects:
– Adversarial attacks: Attempts to feed the IR system false information or requests to manipulate it. Models must identify and resist these attacks to maintain the authenticity of search results.
– OOD scenarios: Models often encounter data not part of their training datasets. So, they must generalize successfully to these new questions and documents to give reliable results.
– Performance variance: Indicates how consistently a model performs across varied queries. A dependable IR model must display minimum performance degradation, even under less ideal situations.
A recent study highlighted adversarial and OOD robustness, particularly in the context of dense retrieval models (DRMs) and neural ranking models (NRMs), crucial components of the neural IR pipeline. DRMs initially retrieve relevant documents, which NRMs subsequently rank based on their relevance to a query. The resilience of these models is paramount to the overall reliability of the IR system.
The study undertook a comprehensive examination of existing resilient neural IR model approaches, databases, and assessment parameters. Identifying future challenges and potential paths in this field, it provided valuable insights for those working on enhancing the resilience of IR systems. Researchers have provided the benchmark for assessing the resilience of neural IR models, called BestIR (https://github.com/Davion-Liu/BestIR. ).
The research significantly advanced understanding of robust neural IR. Providing a definition of ‘robustness’ and a deeper understanding of various categories within it, the study supported the long-term development of resilient neural IR systems.
By providing an in-depth description of related evaluation metrics, datasets, and procedures, the study brought existing datasets together and offered the BestIR benchmark. This new standardized framework allows for the assessment and comparison of an array of IR model robustness. The team shared its results in a paper and a GitHub project.