HFEPX · Eval paper review
Tzu-I Ho, Yung-Yu Shih, Shang-Yu Su, Dongzhe Wang +1 more
Published
Sep 29, 2026
Citations
0
Trust level
Moderate
Usefulness score
25/100 (Low)
Extraction confidence
55% (Moderate)
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Rater population
Not reported
Signals refreshed
Sep 29, 2026
This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.
Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.
Best use
Background context only
Use if you need
A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.
What to verify
Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.
Main weakness
No major weakness surfaced.
Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.
If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus. Any single LLM, however, is limited by its training data and architectural biases, and its enrichment behavior depends on hand-crafted prompts that must be re-engineered for each new model -- an expensive and poorly scalable process. We present MERGE (Multi-LLM Ensemble for Retrieval via Generative Enrichment), a two-stage framework: three heterogeneous 7-8B open-source LLMs independently produce candidate expansions, and a larger LLM generatively synthesizes them into a single query. To make prompt engineering scalable across the ensemble, we integrate a task-grounded Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) loop into both stages. Unlike APO methods that judge candidates with an LLM evaluator, our loop scores each candidate by its downstream retrieval performance and runs a small tournament between the current champion prompt and optimizer-proposed drafts, terminating once the champion survives two consecutive rounds; a history-augmented variant additionally feeds the recent tournament trajectory back to the optimizer. MERGE is retriever-agnostic and issues a single BM25 pass with no rank fusion, no supervised document expansion, and no re-indexing. On five BEIR benchmarks (NQ, SciFact, FiQA, Touche-2020, DBPedia), MERGE improves BM25 nDCG@10 over the original queries by +2.1 to +14.9 points and matches or outperforms strong LLM-based query-expansion baselines despite using only compact open-source models. Ablations confirm that the Stage-2 ensemble beats any single Stage-1 LLM, and that task-grounded APO converts large seed-prompt regressions into consistent gains without hand-tuning.
These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.
None explicit
No explicit feedback protocol extracted.
"Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus."
Automatic Metrics
Includes extracted eval setup.
"Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus."
Not reported
No explicit QC controls found.
"Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus."
NQ, BEIR
Useful for quick benchmark comparison.
"On five BEIR benchmarks (NQ, SciFact, FiQA, Touche-2020, DBPedia), MERGE improves BM25 nDCG@10 over the original queries by +2.1 to +14.9 points and matches or outperforms strong LLM-based query-expansion baselines despite using only compact open-source models."
Ndcg
Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.
"On five BEIR benchmarks (NQ, SciFact, FiQA, Touche-2020, DBPedia), MERGE improves BM25 nDCG@10 over the original queries by +2.1 to +14.9 points and matches or outperforms strong LLM-based query-expansion baselines despite using only compact open-source models."
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus.
Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.
Human feedback protocol is explicit
No explicit human feedback protocol detected.
Evaluation mode is explicit
Detected: Automatic Metrics
Quality control reporting appears
No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.
Benchmark or dataset anchors are present
Detected: NQ, BEIR
Metric reporting is present
Detected: ndcg
