In plain words: A new collection of 126 retrieval tasks across 6 domains tests how well models find relevant text when told what to look for. Models trained to follow instructions beat regular ones overall, but still struggle on rare, less common tasks.
Abstract · MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval
Recent information retrieval (IR) models are pre-trained and instruction-tuned on massive datasets and tasks, enabling them to perform well on a wide range of tasks and potentially generalize to unseen tasks with instructions. However, existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. In this paper, we propose MAIR (Massive Instructed Retrieval Benchmark), a heterogeneous IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains, collected from existing datasets. We benchmark state-of-the-art instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models. Our experiments reveal that instruction-tuned models generally achieve superior performance compared to non-instruction-tuned models on MAIR. Additionally, our results suggest that current instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models still lack effectiveness in specific long-tail tasks. MAIR is publicly available at https://github.com/sunnweiwei/Mair.
Weiwei Sun, Zhengliang Shi, Jiulong Wu, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Yiding Liu, Min Cao, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
arXiv:2410.10127 · cs.IR · submitted Oct 14, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2024