Modern deterministic retrieval pipelines prioritize achieving state-of-the-art performance but often lack interpretability in decision-making. These models face challenges in assessing uncertainty, leading to overconfident predictions. To overcome these limitations, we integrate uncertainty calibration and interpretability into a retrieval pipeline. Specifically, we introduce Bayesian methodologies and multi-perspective retrieval to calibrate uncertainty within a retrieval pipeline. We incorporate techniques such as LIME and SHAP to analyze the behavior of a black-box reranker model. The importance scores derived from these explanation methodologies serve as supplementary relevance scores to enhance the base reranker model. We evaluate the resulting performance enhancements achieved through uncertainty calibration and interpretable reranking on Question Answering and Fact Checking tasks. Our methods demonstrate substantial performance improvements across three KILT datasets.
Explainable information retrieval is an emerging research area aiming to make transparent and trustworthy information retrieval systems. Given the increasing use of complex machine learning models in search systems, explainability is essential in building and auditing responsible information retrieval models. This survey fills a vital gap in the otherwise topically diverse literature of explainable information retrieval. It categorizes and discusses recent explainability methods developed for different application domains in information retrieval, providing a common framework and unifying pers…
Product retrieval systems have served as the main entry for customers to discover and purchase products online. With increasing concerns on the transparency and accountability of AI systems, studies on explainable information retrieval has received more and more attention in the research community. Interestingly, in the domain of e-commerce, despite the extensive studies on explainable product recommendation, the studies of explainable product search is still in an early stage. In this paper, we study how to construct effective explainable product search by comparing model-agnostic explanation…
Retrieval models in information retrieval are used to rank documents for typically under-specified queries. Today machine learning is used to learn retrieval models from click logs and/or relevance judgments that maximizes an objective correlated with user satisfaction. As these models become increasingly powerful and sophisticated, they also become harder to understand. Consequently, it is hard for to identify artifacts in training, data specific biases and intents from a complex trained model like neural rankers even if trained purely on text features. EXS is a search system designed specifi…
G-Refer: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Explainable Recommendation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
EndoFinder: Online Image Retrieval for Explainable Colorectal Polyp Diagnosis
Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院数字医学研究中心）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）；Endoscopy Center and Endoscopy Research Institute, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University（复旦大学附属中山医院内镜中心及内镜研究所）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学联盟曼彻斯特商学院）
Thanks to recent advancements in machine learning, vector-based methods have been adopted in many modern information retrieval (IR) systems. While showing promising retrieval performance, these approaches typically fail to explain why a particular document is retrieved as a query result to address explainable information retrieval(XIR). Knowledge graphs record structured information about entities and inherently explainable relationships. Most of existing XIR approaches focus exclusively on the retrieval model with little consideration on using existing knowledge graphs for providing an explan…
A content-based image retrieval system based on multinomial relevance feedback is proposed. The system relies on an interactive search paradigm where at each round a user is presented with k images and selects the one closest to their ideal target. Two approaches, one based on the Dirichlet distribution and one based the Beta distribution, are used to model the problem motivating an algorithm that trades exploration and exploitation in presenting the images in each round. Experimental results show that the new approach compares favourably with previous work.
In this paper we present a synthesis of work performed on tow information retrieval models: Bayesian network information retrieval model witch encode (in) dependence relation between terms and possibilistic network information retrieval model witch make use of necessity and possibility measures to represent the fuzziness of pertinence measure. It is known that the use of a general Bayesian network methodology as the basis for an IR system is difficult to tackle. The problem mainly appears because of the large number of variables involved and the computational efforts needed to both determine t…
AgenticRAG: Tool-Augmented Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Explainable Recommender Systems
Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China hangli\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China zehua\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China xiaofan\；Economic Law School China University of Political Science；School of Computer Science Peking University Beijing, China
Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with the identification of documents in a collection that are relevant to a given information need, usually represented as a query containing terms or keywords, which are supposed to be a good description of what the user is looking for. IR systems may improve their effectiveness (i.e., increasing the number of relevant documents retrieved) by using a process of query expansion, which automatically adds new terms to the original query posed by an user. In this paper we develop a method of query expansion based on Bayesian networks. Using a learning algor…
In any ranking system, the retrieval model outputs a single score for a document based on its belief on how relevant it is to a given search query. While retrieval models have continued to improve with the introduction of increasingly complex architectures, few works have investigated a retrieval model's belief in the score beyond the scope of a single value. We argue that capturing the model's uncertainty with respect to its own scoring of a document is a critical aspect of retrieval that allows for greater use of current models across new document distributions, collections, or even improvin…
Recent numerical results show that non-Bayesian knowledge revision may be helpful in search engine training and optimization. In order to demonstrate how basic assumption about about the physical nature (and hence the observed statistics) of retrieved documents can affect the performance of search engines we suggest an idealized toy model with minimal number of parameters.
