Related papers: Exploiting Positional Bias for Query-Agnostic Gene…

This work considers a black-box threat model in which adversaries attempt to propagate arbitrary non-relevant content in search. We show that retrievers, rerankers, and LLM relevance judges are all highly vulnerable to attacks that enable…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have undergone significant development and have become integral components of information retrieval (IR) systems. Unfortunately, recent research has unveiled the vulnerability of NRMs to adversarial document…

Adversarial attacks have gained traction in order to identify potential vulnerabilities in neural ranking models (NRMs), but current attack methods often introduce grammatical errors, nonsensical expressions, or incoherent text fragments,…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…

Major search engine providers are rapidly incorporating Large Language Model (LLM)-generated content in response to user queries. These conversational search engines operate by loading retrieved website text into the LLM context for…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have attracted considerable attention in information retrieval. Unfortunately, NRMs may inherit the adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural networks, which might be leveraged by black-hat search engine…

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…

Neural ranking models have shown outstanding performance across a variety of tasks, such as document retrieval, re-ranking, question answering and conversational retrieval. However, the inner decision process of these models remains largely…

Contextual ranking models based on BERT are now well established for a wide range of passage and document ranking tasks. However, the robustness of BERT-based ranking models under adversarial inputs is under-explored. In this paper, we…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, especially with pre-trained language models. However, deep neural models are notorious for their vulnerability to adversarial examples. Adversarial attacks may…

Recent research has shown that neural information retrieval techniques may be susceptible to adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks seek to manipulate the ranking of documents, with the intention of exposing users to targeted content. In…

Neural models have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse ranking tasks. However, the processes and internal mechanisms along which they determine relevance are still largely unknown. Existing approaches for analyzing neural…

Retrieval Augmented Generation enhances LLM accuracy by adding passages retrieved from an external corpus to the LLM prompt. This paper investigates how positional bias - the tendency of LLMs to weight information differently based on its…

The search of information in large text repositories has been plagued by the so-called document-query vocabulary gap, i.e. the semantic discordance between the contents in the stored document entities on the one hand and the human query on…

Transformer networks, particularly those achieving performance comparable to GPT models, are well known for their robust feature extraction abilities. However, the nature of these extracted features and their alignment with human-engineered…

Current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made it increasingly feasible to build applications leveraging textual data. Generally, the core of these applications rely on having a good semantic representation of text into…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) achieve strong retrieval effectiveness, yet prior work has shown they are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. We revisit this robustness question with a minimal, query-aware attack that promotes a target…

Robustness of huge Transformer-based models for natural language processing is an important issue due to their capabilities and wide adoption. One way to understand and improve robustness of these models is an exploration of an adversarial…

Deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly pre-trained language models (PLMs), have been revealed to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, the adversarial examples generated by many mainstream…

Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…