Ranking & Retrieval at SIGIR 2026 & ICTIR 2026

1 · Reasoning-first ranking & LLM rerankers

SIGIR Rank-R1: Enhancing Reasoning in LLM-based Document Rerankers via Reinforcement Learning — RL-trained reranker that reasons over query and candidates before ordering. DOI arXiv
SIGIR Think When Needed: Model-Aware Reasoning Routing for LLM-based Ranking — Spends reasoning only on queries that need it; routes the rest to cheap scoring. DOI
SIGIR When Vision Meets Texts in Listwise Reranking — Listwise LLM reranking that jointly reasons over visual and textual candidates. DOI
SIGIR On the Robustness of LLM Re-Rankings — Stress-tests how stable LLM re-ranking is under perturbation. DOI
SIGIR The Vulnerability of LLM Rankers to Prompt Injection Attacks — Shows LLM rankers can be gamed by injected instructions in documents. DOI
SIGIR CRED: Calibrated Relational Enhanced Distillation for LLM-Based Pointwise Reranking — Distillation to make pointwise LLM reranking calibrated and cheaper. DOI
SIGIR Consensus-Anchored Expansion for Noise-Resilient Re-ranking — Anchors on consensus signals to keep re-ranking robust to noise. DOI
SIGIR Domain-Specific Reranking: When is Adaptation Worth the Cost? — Empirically maps when domain adaptation of rerankers pays off. DOI
SIGIR Revisiting Text Ranking in Deep Research — Re-examines classic text ranking inside deep-research pipelines. DOI
SIGIR One Pass, Any Order: Position-Invariant Listwise Reranking for LLM-Based Recommendation — Removes position bias from listwise LLM reranking for rec. DOI
SIGIR When Search Is Not Enough: Ranking Content for Query-Less Browse Surfaces — Ranking where there is no query, only a browse surface. DOI
SIGIR From Unstructured to Structured: LLM-Guided Attribute Graphs for Entity Search and Ranking — Builds attribute graphs with LLMs to rank entities. DOI
SIGIR Temporal User-Agnostic Ranking: Detecting Preference Evolution while Preserving Ethical Principles — Ranks over time without per-user profiling. DOI
SIGIR Learning to Summarize for Search Relevance with Reinforcement Learning — RL-tuned summaries used as a search-relevance signal. DOI
SIGIR rerankers: A Lightweight Unified Toolkit for Reranking Approaches — Open toolkit unifying many reranking methods behind one API. DOI
ICTIR Does Form Affect Function? An Extended Study of LLM Re-Ranking Behavior — Probes whether reasoning rerankers are stable across prompt/format. DOI
ICTIR Ranking Passages in Relevant Documents Using LLMs — Intra-document passage ranking from LLM relevance signals. DOI
ICTIR Adaptive Re-Ranking — Adjusts re-ranking depth/effort per query rather than a fixed cutoff. DOI
ICTIR Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking — Separates surface entity labels from signals that drive relevance. DOI
ICTIR Rank-ICL: Ranking-based In-context Learning for Search Result Explanation — Ranking-based in-context examples to explain results. DOI
ICTIR Rank, Don't Generate: Statement-level Ranking for Explainable Recommendation — Ranks candidate explanation statements instead of generating text. DOI

2 · Retrieval for agents, deep research, RAG & QA

SIGIR HiRA: Decoupling Planning and Execution with Hierarchical Reasoning in Deep Search — Separates strategic planning from specialized execution in deep search. DOI
SIGIR Learning to Retrieve from Agent Trajectories — Trains the retriever directly on agent interaction data. DOI arXiv
SIGIR Agentic Search in the Wild: Intents and Trajectory Dynamics from 14M+ Real Search Requests — Large-scale empirical characterization of how agents search. DOI arXiv
SIGIR Towards Knowledgeable Deep Research: Framework and Benchmark — New framework and benchmark for knowledge-grounded deep research. DOI
SIGIR Deep Search with Hierarchical Meta-Cognitive Monitoring Inspired by Cognitive Neuroscience — Adds explicit hierarchical metacognition to deep-search control. DOI
SIGIR SmartSearch: Process Reward-Guided Query Refinement for Search Agents — Process rewards and dual-level credit to improve agent queries. DOI
SIGIR Personalized Deep Research: A User-Centric Framework, Dataset, and Hybrid Evaluation — Personalizes deep research with a dataset and hybrid evaluation. DOI
SIGIR Mixture-of-Retrieval Experts for Reasoning-Guided Multimodal Knowledge Exploitation — Routes among specialized retrievers for multimodal reasoning. DOI
SIGIR Exploration-and-Thinking: Agentic Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs via LLM-RL Synergy — LLM+RL agent that reasons over knowledge graphs. DOI
SIGIR STRIDE: Strategic Iterative Decision-Making for Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Hop QA — Iterative decision-making for multi-hop RAG question answering. DOI
SIGIR Question-Adaptive Graph Learning for Multi-hop Retrieval Augmented Generation — Graph learning tailored per question for multi-hop RAG. DOI
SIGIR Incentivizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Inner Adaptive Context Selection — Learns to select context inside the RAG loop. DOI
SIGIR Numerical Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Detection and Analysis — Detects and analyzes number errors in RAG output. DOI
SIGIR PurifAI: Detecting and Fixing Search-Induced Distortions in Web-Augmented LLMs — Cleans distortions introduced by web search into LLM answers. DOI
SIGIR Policy-Guided RAG: Enforcing Verbatim and Controlled Synthesis — Constrains RAG generation to policy-verbatim synthesis. DOI
SIGIR Fast and Faithful: Real-Time Verification for Long-Document RAG Systems — Real-time faithfulness verification for long-document RAG. DOI
SIGIR How Should Multimodal Information Be Chunked for Complex Question Answering? — Studies chunking strategies for multimodal QA. DOI
SIGIR Reward Shaping for Robust Refusal in Small Language Models for RAG QA — Teaches small models to refuse when RAG evidence is weak. DOI
SIGIR CroSearch-R1: Better Leveraging Cross-lingual Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation — Cross-lingual knowledge use in RAG. DOI
SIGIR Hierarchical Embedding Fusion for Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation — Fuses embeddings for retrieval-augmented code generation. DOI
SIGIR SRAG: A Lightweight and Specialized Retrieval-augmented Generation System at the Edge — Compact RAG system that runs at the edge. DOI
SIGIR MCP Servers for Pyserini and RankLLM: Enabling Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation — MCP server wrappers to plug IR tools into agents. DOI
SIGIR AgentSim: A Platform for Verifiable Agent-Trace Simulation — Simulation platform for reproducible agent traces. DOI
SIGIR WebMall - A Multi-Shop Benchmark for Evaluating Web Agents — Benchmark for shopping web agents. DOI
SIGIR Evaluation of Agents under Simulated AI Marketplace Dynamics — Evaluates agents inside a simulated AI marketplace. DOI
SIGIR Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering — Uses NL feedback instead of scalar rewards for personalized QA. DOI
SIGIR Learning to Trust: Dynamic Utilization of RAG for E-commerce Search Relevance — Decides when to trust RAG for e-commerce relevance. DOI
ICTIR DeepResearchGym: A Free, Transparent, and Reproducible Sandbox for Deep Research — Open, reproducible evaluation environment for deep-research agents. DOI
ICTIR Towards Adaptive and Retriever-friendly Retrieval-augmented Generation via Reinforcement Learning — RL-tunes generation to be easier for the retriever to support. DOI
ICTIR Plan-and-Refine in RAG: Diverse and Comprehensive Responses via Global Exploration and Local Exploitation — Global+local search for more complete RAG answers. DOI
ICTIR Beyond Relevance: On the Relationship Between Retrieval and RAG Information Coverage — Retrieval relevance and answer coverage are different objectives. DOI
ICTIR Uncertainty Quantification for Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation — Confidence estimates across retrieval and generation in multimodal RAG. DOI
ICTIR RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with RAG — Retrieves heuristics to detect harmful conversation. DOI
ICTIR RAAD: Retrieval-Augmented Ambiguity Detection via Answer Diversity — Uses answer diversity to flag ambiguous questions. DOI
ICTIR Preventing Content Leakage in LLM-Based Medical RAG: Structure-Only Retrieval — Structure-only retrieval for leak-free clinical summarization. DOI
ICTIR As We May Search — Vision piece re-imagining search in the agentic era. DOI

3 · Evaluation, relevance judgments & LLM-as-judge

SIGIR Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs — Lightweight classifiers can out-judge prompted LLMs. DOI
SIGIR Formalized Information Needs Improve Large-Language-Model Relevance Judgments — Formalizing the need sharpens LLM label quality. DOI
SIGIR Learning to Rank with Multi-Criteria LLM-Judge Annotations — Trains rankers from multi-criteria LLM judgments. DOI
SIGIR When LLM Judges Inflate Scores: Exploring Overrating in Relevance Assessment — Documents systematic over-rating by LLM judges. DOI
SIGIR Humans, LLMs, and Measures Do Not Align in Attributed Information Retrieval — Human, LLM, and metric judgments diverge on attributed IR. DOI
SIGIR Mine over Yours: How Authorship Biases Evaluation in Generative Information Retrieval — Shows authorship bias in generative-IR evaluation. DOI
SIGIR Hybrid Pooling with LLMs via Relevance Context Learning — LLM-assisted pooling to build test collections cheaply. DOI
SIGIR Stop Using the Wilcoxon Test: Myth, Misconception and Misuse in IR Research — Methodological critique of a staple significance test. DOI
SIGIR The Powerless Noise: How Experimental Settings Shape the Reported Power of Noise — How experimental design distorts reported statistical power. DOI
SIGIR Towards a Relevance Posterior in Neural Information Access — Argues for a posterior over relevance, not point labels. DOI
SIGIR G-CoS: An Interpretable Gain-Cost Framework for User Satisfaction Estimation in Generative IR — Interpretable gain-cost model of user satisfaction. DOI
SIGIR Decision-Theoretic Stopping Rules for Document Screening — When to stop screening under a decision-theoretic objective. DOI
SIGIR How Variability Influences Podcast Search: Queries, Transcriptions, and Judges — Transcription and judge variability move podcast-search results. DOI
ICTIR Reasoning with Large Language Models for Relevance Judgements — Tests reasoning-augmented LLMs as relevance assessors. DOI
ICTIR LLM-Driven Usefulness Judgment for Web Search Evaluation — Moves from relevance to usefulness as the LLM-judged signal. DOI
ICTIR DoGMaTiQ: Automated Generation of Question-and-Answer Nuggets for Report Evaluation — Auto-generates nuggets to evaluate long-form reports. DOI
ICTIR Search Arena Meets Nuggets: Explanations and Diagnostics for LLM Response Evaluation — Arena comparison plus nugget diagnostics. DOI
ICTIR Bridging the Gap between Subsampled and Full-Corpus Evaluation — Reconciles cheap subsampled with full-corpus evaluation. DOI
ICTIR To Believe or Not To Believe: Supporting-Information Tools for Judging AI Veracity — Which supporting tools help humans judge AI truthfulness. DOI
ICTIR ARIC: A Cognitive Framework for Explanatory Narrative Evaluation in CIS — Cognitive framework for evaluating explanations in conversational IR. DOI
ICTIR Proposing an Evaluation Framework for Legal Case Retrieval Beyond Binary Relevance — Bibliographic-coupling approach to graded legal-retrieval evaluation. DOI

4 · Dense / sparse / multi-vector retrieval & efficiency

SIGIR Scaling Laws for Embedding Dimension in Information Retrieval — First principled scaling curve for retrieval embedding size. DOI arXiv
SIGIR Efficient Sparse Retrieval with Lightweight Superblock Pruning — Superblock pruning to speed up learned-sparse retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Why Advanced Encoders Lag on Sparse Retrieval? Bridging Vocabulary Gaps — Diagnoses and closes the vocabulary gap for strong encoders. DOI
SIGIR Multi-Vector Index Compression in Any Modality — Modality-agnostic compression for multi-vector indexes. DOI
SIGIR A Voronoi Cell Formulation for Principled Token Pruning in Late-Interaction Retrieval Models — Geometry-grounded token pruning for ColBERT-style retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Comparing Token Pruning Approaches for Multi-Vector Retrieval — Head-to-head study of late-interaction token pruning. DOI
SIGIR Sparton: Fast and Memory-Efficient Triton Kernel for Learned Sparse Retrieval — GPU kernel making learned-sparse retrieval fast and lean. DOI
SIGIR LACONIC: Dense-Level Effectiveness for Scalable Sparse Retrieval via Two-Phase Training — Two-phase curriculum lifts sparse retrieval to dense quality. DOI
SIGIR From Tokens to Concepts: Leveraging SAE for SPLADE — Sparse autoencoders to interpret and improve SPLADE. DOI
SIGIR Scalable K-Means Guided Partitioning for Block-based Sparse Document Retrieval — Cluster-guided partitioning for faster sparse retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Internalizing Explicit Reasoning into Latent Space for Dense Retrieval — Self-distills chain-of-thought into the dense embedding. DOI
SIGIR ARHN: Answer-Centric Relabeling of Hard Negatives with Open-Source LLMs for Dense Retrieval — LLM-relabeled hard negatives for dense retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Constructing Hard-Positive Query-Document Pairs for Dense Retrieval via Phrase Representativeness — Builds hard positives to train dense retrievers. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Hard Negatives: The Importance of Score Distribution in Knowledge Distillation — Score distribution, not just negatives, matters in distillation. DOI
SIGIR Negative Data Mining for Contrastive Learning in Dense Retrieval at IKEA.com — Industrial negative mining for dense retrieval. DOI
SIGIR The Matryoshka Hypencoder — Nested-dimension hypernetwork encoder for flexible embeddings. DOI
SIGIR Semantic Recall for Vector Search — Improving recall in vector search. DOI
SIGIR Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors — Benchmark of filtered ANN over transformer vectors. DOI
SIGIR RankEvolve: Automating the Discovery of Retrieval Algorithms via LLM-Driven Evolution — LLM-driven evolutionary search for retrieval algorithms. DOI
SIGIR A Parametric Memory Head for Continual Generative Retrieval — Memory head for continually-updating generative retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Efficient Continual Adaptation of Generative Retrieval Systems over Dynamic Corpora — Keeps generative retrieval current as corpora change. DOI
SIGIR PrepRet: Automated Data Preparation Pipeline Selection for Neural Retrieval — Auto-selects data-prep pipelines for neural retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Revisiting BM25 Feedback Models using HyDE — Combines classic PRF with hypothetical-document embeddings. DOI
SIGIR Auditing Query Drift: Do Users Actually Benefit from Pseudo-Relevance Feedback? — Questions whether PRF actually helps users. DOI
SIGIR Clustering-Based Methods for Vector-Based Pseudo-Relevance Feedback — Cluster-based PRF for dense retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Insights into the Efficiency of Open-Source Score-at-a-Time Search Engines (Reproducibility) — Reproducibility study of score-at-a-time engines. DOI
SIGIR Reproduction Beyond Benchmarks: ConstBERT and ColBERT-v2 Across Backends and Query Distributions — Reproduces late-interaction models across backends. DOI
SIGIR A Replicability Study of Joint Product Quantisation for Space-Efficient Dense Retrieval — Replicates joint PQ for compact dense retrieval. DOI
ICTIR A Replicability Study of XTR — Reproduces and stress-tests the XTR multi-vector retriever. DOI
ICTIR Model Merging as an Alternative to Fine-Tuning for a Multi-Domain Dense Retriever — Merges domain experts instead of fine-tuning on combined data. DOI
ICTIR Analysis of Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval in Japanese — Reasoning-heavy retrieval beyond English. DOI
ICTIR Effectiveness of Sparse Retrieval for Automated Fact-Checking — Revisits learned-sparse retrieval for evidence finding. DOI

5 · Learning-to-rank theory, bias, click models & fairness

SIGIR Diagnosing Identifiability in Two-Tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank — Identifiability conditions for two-tower unbiased LTR. DOI
SIGIR Logit Inflation in ListMLE: Theoretical Analysis and Mitigation Strategies — Diagnoses and fixes a pathology in the ListMLE loss. DOI
SIGIR LearnDCG: End-to-End Joint Optimization of Ranker and Loss in Neural Ranking — Jointly learns the ranker and its ranking loss. DOI
SIGIR OPS: An Order-Preserving Sorting Network for Information Retrieval — Differentiable order-preserving sorting for ranking. DOI
SIGIR Unifying On- and Off-Policy Variance Reduction Methods — Unified variance reduction for counterfactual/LTR estimation. DOI
SIGIR Additive Control Variates Dominate Self-Normalisation in Off-Policy Evaluation — Better estimators for off-policy IR evaluation. DOI
SIGIR Variance Reduction for Heavy-Tailed Monetization Metrics in Ranking Experiments — Post-stratification for noisy ranking A/B metrics. DOI
SIGIR CLAX: Fast and Flexible Neural Click Models in JAX — Fast neural click-model library. DOI
SIGIR An Epistemic Position-Based Click Model: From Interactions to Distributions of Relevance and Bias — Click model yielding distributions over relevance and bias. DOI
SIGIR Post-hoc Provider Fairness Adaptation via Hierarchical Exposure Alignment — Exposure-aligned provider fairness applied post-hoc. DOI
SIGIR Adaptive Autoguidance for Item-Side Fairness in Diffusion Recommender Systems — Item-side fairness for diffusion recommenders. DOI
ICTIR Exposure-Based Reinforcement Learning to Rank — RL-to-rank driven by exposure rather than raw clicks. DOI
ICTIR A Theoretical Framework for Risk Analysis of Stochastic Rankers — Formal risk analysis for rankers that sample orderings. DOI
ICTIR From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion — Casts ranking as a denoising-diffusion process. DOI
ICTIR Prior-Data Fitted Networks as Tabular Foundation Models for Ranking in Low-Data Settings — Brings PFNs to ranking where labels are scarce. DOI
ICTIR Relaxed Term Matching for Neural Axiomatic Diagnostics — Axiomatic diagnostics adapted to neural rankers. DOI
ICTIR Stability in Competitive Search with Results Diversification — Game-theoretic stability when content competes. DOI

6 · Generative recommendation, semantic IDs & LLM recommenders

SIGIR Universal Item Tokenization for Transferable Generative Recommendation — Transferable item tokenization across domains. DOI
SIGIR Semantic IDs for Recommender Systems at Snapchat: Use Cases, Challenges, Design Choices — Production use of semantic IDs at Snapchat. DOI
SIGIR SID-Coord: Coordinating Semantic IDs for ID-based Ranking in Short-Video Search — Coordinates semantic IDs with ID-based ranking. DOI
SIGIR Mitigating Collaborative Semantic ID Staleness in Generative Retrieval — Keeps semantic IDs fresh in generative retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Verifiable Reasoning for LLM-based Generative Recommendation — Adds verifiable reasoning traces to LLM recommenders. DOI
SIGIR Beyond the Single Path: Divergent Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation — Counters reasoning-path collapse in LLM recommenders. DOI
SIGIR Think, But Don't Tell: Implicit Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation via Multi-Teacher Distillation — Distills large-model reasoning into lightweight recommenders. DOI
SIGIR BEAR: Towards Beam-Search-Aware Optimization for Recommendation with LLMs — Aligns training with beam search in LLM rec. DOI
SIGIR GFlowGR: Fine-tuning Generative Recommendation Frameworks with Generative Flow Networks — GFlowNets for generative recommendation. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Static Best-of-N: Bayesian List-wise Alignment for LLM-based Recommendation — Bayesian listwise alignment for LLM rec. DOI
SIGIR Adaptive Mix Preference Optimization for Generative Recommendation — Mixed preference optimization for generative rec. DOI
SIGIR Learning Decomposed Contextual Token Representations for Generative Recommendation — Decomposed token representations for generative rec. DOI
SIGIR LWGR: Lagrangian-Constrained Personalized World Knowledge for Generative Recommendation — Injects constrained world knowledge into generative rec. DOI
SIGIR AIPO: Adaptive Anchored Intent-aware Policy Optimization for Generative Recommendation — Intent-aware policy optimization for generative rec. DOI
SIGIR GenRec: A Preference-Oriented Generative Framework for Large-Scale Recommendation — Preference-oriented generative rec at scale. DOI
SIGIR M2GR: Generative User Interest Modeling via Multi-Granularity Multi-Objective CoT — Multi-granularity CoT for industrial generative rec. DOI
SIGIR Large-Scale Online Learning for Generative List Recommendation in E-commerce — Online learning for generative list rec. DOI
SIGIR Full Retraining, Incremental Fine-tuning, and Hybrid Serving for Industrial Generative Recommenders — Serving strategies for industrial generative rec. DOI
SIGIR GNN-Based Item Indexing for LLM-Enhanced Recommendation — GNN item indexing to feed LLM recommenders. DOI
SIGIR Modular Representation Compression: Adapting LLM Representations for Efficient Recommendation — Controls modularity of LLM representations for rec. DOI
SIGIR ItemRAG: Item-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-Based Recommendation — Item-based RAG for LLM recommenders. DOI
SIGIR Unifying Search and Recommendation in LLMs via Gradient Multi-Subspace Tuning — One LLM for both search and recommendation. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Item IDs: Scaling Short-Form-Video Recommendation via Semantic-Native Long Sequence Modeling — Semantic-native sequences for short-video rec. DOI

7 · Recommendation: sequential, multimodal, graph, CF, CTR & ads

SIGIR SpecTran: Spectral-Aware Transformer-based Adapter for LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation — Spectral adapter for LLM-enhanced sequential rec. DOI
SIGIR Contrastive Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering — Flow matching applied to collaborative filtering. DOI
SIGIR Revisiting Collaborative Filtering by Unleashing the Power of Similarity — Rethinks similarity in collaborative filtering. DOI
SIGIR Adaptive Rich-kernelized Contrastive Learning for Collaborative Filtering — Kernelized contrastive CF. DOI
SIGIR MLLMRec: A Preference Reasoning Paradigm with Graph Refinement for Multimodal Recommendation — Preference reasoning + graph refinement for multimodal rec. DOI
SIGIR Robust Multimodal Recommendation via Graph Retrieval-Enhanced Modality Completion — Completes missing modalities via graph retrieval. DOI
SIGIR DIGEST: Dynamic Graph Refinement with Dual Contrastive Semantic Transfer for Multimodal Recommendation — Dynamic graph refinement for multimodal rec. DOI
SIGIR Structural and Disentangled Adaptation of Large VLMs for Multimodal Recommendation — Adapts VLMs for multimodal rec. DOI
SIGIR From Raw Features to Effective Embeddings: Multimodal Recipe Recommendation — Three-stage embeddings for recipe rec. DOI
SIGIR Countering Interest Over-Smoothing: Distilling Latent Factors via Diffusion for Multi-Interest Retrieval — Diffusion to preserve diverse user interests. DOI
SIGIR Inferring Targets from Calibrated Hesitations in Multi-Behavior Recommendation — Uses hesitation signals in multi-behavior rec. DOI
SIGIR Exploring Test-time Scaling via Prediction Merging on Large-Scale Recommendation — Test-time scaling by merging predictions. DOI
SIGIR Optimizing Marketing Subsidies via Counterfactual Learning with Asymmetric Reward — Counterfactual learning for subsidy allocation. DOI
SIGIR From Clues to Generation: Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation — Language-guided diffusion for cross-domain rec. DOI
SIGIR Bridging Behavior and Semantics for Time-aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation — Time-aware cross-domain sequential rec. DOI
SIGIR Fusion and Alignment Enhancement with LLMs for Tail-item Sequential Recommendation — LLM help for long-tail items. DOI
SIGIR AsarRec: Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation — Augmentation for robust self-supervised seq rec. DOI
SIGIR HyFormer: Revisiting Sequence Modeling and Feature Interaction in CTR Prediction — Rethinks CTR sequence + feature interaction. DOI
SIGIR Understanding DNNs in Feature Interaction Models: A Dimensional Collapse Perspective — Explains feature-interaction models via dimensional collapse. DOI
SIGIR Equip Pre-ranking with Target Attention by Residual Quantization — Target attention for efficient pre-ranking. DOI
SIGIR Generative Auto-Bidding with Unified Modeling and Exploration — Generative auto-bidding for ads. DOI
SIGIR DIVER: Unlocking Diversity in Ad Headline Generation with Large Language Models — Diverse ad-headline generation. DOI
SIGIR Debiased Recommendation Beyond the Positive Propensity Assumption — Debiasing without the positive-propensity assumption. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Dense Connectivity: Explicit Sparsity for Scalable Recommendation — Explicit sparsity for scalable rec. DOI
ICTIR RecQuest: Towards Estimating User Domain Knowledge in Conversational Recommender Systems — Infers a user's expertise to adapt conversational recommendation. DOI
ICTIR Equity by Design? On the Trade-Offs in Fairness-Driven Recommendation in Heterogeneous Two-Sided Markets — Analyzes fairness trade-offs across two-sided markets. DOI
ICTIR RAMP: Robust Ad Recommendation Under Limited Personalized-Feature Availability via Masking and Alignment — Masking + alignment for ad rec when personalization is sparse. DOI
ICTIR RIDRec: Retrieval-Enhanced Intent Diffusion for Anonymous Short-Session Recommendation — Diffusion over retrieved intents for cold, anonymous sessions. DOI

8 · Multimodal, cross-modal & structured retrieval

SIGIR Attention Grounded Enhancement for Visual Document Retrieval — Grounds attention to improve document-image retrieval. DOI
SIGIR ReAlign: Optimizing the Visual Document Retriever with Reasoning-Guided Fine-Grained Alignment — Reasoning-guided alignment for visual-doc retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Generation-Augmented Video Corpus Moment Retrieval — Reframes moment retrieval as generative understanding. DOI
SIGIR From Interference to Stability: Video Moment Retrieval with Relevance Feedback — Relevance feedback for video moment retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Unifying Granularity and Reliability: Text-based Person Retrieval — Robust, efficient text-based person retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Corpus-Centric Learning for Zero-Shot Table Retrieval — Zero-shot retrieval over tabular corpora. DOI
SIGIR FollowTable: A Benchmark for Instruction-Following Table Retrieval — Benchmark for instruction-conditioned table retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Visual-RAG: Benchmarking Text-to-Image Retrieval Augmented Generation — Benchmark for text-to-image RAG. DOI
SIGIR Spectral-Adaptive Adversarial Hashing for Robust Image Retrieval — Adversarially robust hashing for image retrieval. DOI
SIGIR A Sketch+Text Composed Image Retrieval Dataset for Thangka — Composed image retrieval dataset (Thangka art). DOI
SIGIR Agentic Spatio-Temporal Grounding via Collaborative Reasoning — Agentic grounding across space and time. DOI
SIGIR FAST-MEL: Fast, Accurate, Storage-Efficient Multimodal Entity Linking — Efficient multimodal entity linking. DOI
SIGIR CoMCo: Consistency-Aware Multi-Agent Coordination for Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Entity Matching — Multi-agent zero-shot cross-modal matching. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Unimodal Perspectives: Generative Retrieval with Multimodal Semantics — Generative retrieval with multimodal semantics. DOI
SIGIR Learning Noise-Resilient and Transferable Graph-Text Alignment via Dynamic Quality Assessment — Robust graph-text alignment. DOI
SIGIR Seeing the Whole Through the Parts: Object Discovery via Semantic Part Mining — Weakly-supervised object discovery. DOI
ICTIR Adaptive Token-Aware Query Reformulation for Text-to-Image Retrieval — Token-aware reformulation for cross-modal retrieval. DOI

9 · Search behavior, query & intent understanding, GenAI-vs-search

SIGIR An Eye Tracking Study: Are AI Overviews Changing Search Behavior? — Eye-tracking evidence on AI Overviews' effect on attention. DOI
SIGIR How Generative AI Disrupts Search: An Empirical Study of Google Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews — Measures GenAI's effect on real search outcomes. DOI
SIGIR A Comparative Study of Users' Information-Seeking Across Search Engines and Generative AI Chatbots — Search vs. chatbot information-seeking behavior. DOI
SIGIR From Lab to Reality: An Eye-tracking Study of How Users are Influenced to Search in the Era of GenAI — How GenAI influences search behavior, in situ. DOI
SIGIR Following the Eye-Tracking Evidence: Established Web-Search Assumptions Fail in Carousel Interfaces — Position-bias assumptions break in carousels. DOI
SIGIR Understanding and Modeling Heterogeneous Search Behavior — Models the diversity of real search strategies. DOI
SIGIR User Search Behavior and Knowledge Effects in a Hybrid Search Environment — Knowledge effects in hybrid (classic+AI) search. DOI
SIGIR Characterising the Effects of Social Conformity on Information Seeking in Mixed Human-AI Environments — Social conformity in human-AI search. DOI
SIGIR Cognitive Style Shapes Search Behaviours: An fNIRS Study of Exploratory Search — Brain-imaging study of exploratory search. DOI
SIGIR Cross-Sensory Comparison of EEG Signals for Brain-Based Information Retrieval — EEG signals for brain-based IR. DOI
SIGIR What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines — Generative-engine optimization in AI answer engines. DOI
SIGIR Recasting Web-Scale Query Suggestion as Dense Retrieval — Query suggestion via dense retrieval. DOI
SIGIR Automating Generation of Long-Form Queries — Synthesizes human-style long queries. DOI
SIGIR IPQA: A Benchmark for Core Intent Identification in Personalized Question Answering — Benchmark for personalized-QA intent. DOI
SIGIR NeurPIU: Neurobiologically Inspired Personalized Intent Understanding in LLMs — Bio-inspired personalized intent modeling. DOI
SIGIR Agentic Query Reformulation for Contextualized Hyper-Personalized Product Search — Agentic reformulation for product search. DOI
SIGIR Beyond Semantic Similarity: Explicit Intent Modeling for Query-Product Matching — Explicit intent for query-product matching. DOI
SIGIR Behavioral Feature Boosting via Substitute Relationships for E-commerce Search — Substitute-aware features for e-commerce search. DOI
SIGIR When & How to Write for Personalized Demand-aware Query Rewriting in Video Search — Personalized query rewriting for video search. DOI
SIGIR Demand-Calibrated Facet Diversification with Deployable Soft Quotas for E-Commerce Search — Facet diversification with soft quotas. DOI
SIGIR Policy-Grounded Dynamic Facet Suggestions for Job Search — Dynamic facet suggestions for job search. DOI
SIGIR Synthetic Data Powers Product Retrieval for Long-tail Knowledge-Intensive Queries — Synthetic data for long-tail product retrieval. DOI
SIGIR SkyDistill: Navigating Fuzzy Flight Search Ranking via Precise Intent Distillation — Intent distillation for flight-search ranking. DOI
SIGIR KARMA: Knowledge-Action Regularized Multimodal Alignment for Personalized Search at Taobao — Multimodal personalized search in production. DOI
SIGIR Evaluating Proactivity in Conversational Search through Anticipatory Retrieval — Measures proactive/anticipatory conversational search. DOI

10 · Fact-checking, verification & harmful-content detection

SIGIR Multi-Sourced, Multi-Agent Evidence Retrieval for Fact-Checking — Multi-agent evidence retrieval for fact-checking. DOI
SIGIR Towards Evidence-Aware Retrieval and Verification for Scientific Fact-Checking — Evidence-aware retrieval for science claims. DOI
SIGIR Attend to Fragments: How Key Information Affects LLMs for Factual Inconsistency Detection — Fragment attention for inconsistency detection. DOI
SIGIR Mitigating Adversarial Attacks by Transferring LLM-generated Narrative Reasoning for Robust Fake News Detection — Narrative reasoning transfer for fake-news robustness. DOI
SIGIR ExDR: Explanation-driven Dynamic Retrieval Enhancement for Multimodal Fake News Detection — Explanation-driven retrieval for multimodal fake news. DOI
SIGIR Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Model for Fake News Detection — RAG-style multimodal fake-news detection. DOI
SIGIR AdversarialCoT: Single-Document Retrieval Poisoning for LLM Reasoning — Shows retrieval-poisoning attacks on LLM reasoning. DOI
SIGIR JARVIS: An Evidence-Grounded Retrieval System for Interpretable Deceptive Reviews Adjudication — Evidence-grounded detection of deceptive reviews. DOI
SIGIR EVADE-Bench: Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Evasive Content Detection — Benchmark for evasive-content detection. DOI
SIGIR Deja Vu in Plots: Cross-Session Evidence with Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Live Streaming Risk Assessment — Cross-session RAG for live-streaming risk. DOI

11 · Domain, specialized retrieval & resources

SIGIR RULER: Robust Unified LLM-based Efficient Retrieval for Legal Information — Unified LLM retrieval tuned for legal search. DOI
SIGIR Enhancing Judgment Document Generation via Agentic Legal Information Collection and Rubric-Guided Optimization — Agentic legal-document generation. DOI
SIGIR KCC: Korean Civil Case Dataset for Legal Information Retrieval — Korean legal-IR dataset. DOI
SIGIR ViCSR: A Benchmark and Two-Stage Framework for Vietnamese Case-to-Statute Retrieval — Vietnamese case-to-statute retrieval. DOI
SIGIR CTCL: A Cross-Language Benchmark for Matching Patients to Clinical Trials — Patient-to-trial matching benchmark. DOI
SIGIR Improving Amharic Information Retrieval with Translative and Multi-Agent Debate RAG — Multilingual RAG for Amharic. DOI
SIGIR Morphology-Aware Retrieval for Low-Resource Environments: Shona — Morphology-aware retrieval for Shona. DOI
SIGIR Building Foundations for IR in Extremely Low-Resource Ethnic Languages: Tanzania — IR foundations for Tanzanian languages. DOI
SIGIR SQuTR: A Robustness Benchmark for Spoken Query to Text Retrieval under Acoustic Noise — Spoken-query retrieval robustness benchmark. DOI
SIGIR CSyMR: Benchmarking Compositional Music Information Retrieval in Symbolic Music Reasoning — Symbolic-music IR benchmark. DOI
SIGIR Multilingual and Domain-Agnostic Tip-of-the-Tongue Query Generation for Simulated Evaluation — Tip-of-the-tongue query generation. DOI
SIGIR The Wikidata Query Logs Dataset — Large Wikidata query-log resource. DOI
SIGIR Retrieve, Rerank, Answer, Experiment: Hands-On IR Research with PyTerrier — Hands-on IR research toolkit resource. DOI
SIGIR T-RADAR: Simulating Trademark Examination as an Interactive Retrieval Interface — Trademark-examination retrieval interface. DOI
SIGIR Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval — Passage retrieval for patent-novelty judgments. DOI
ICTIR Interpretable Legal Similarity: From Embeddings to Obligations — Maps legal embedding similarity to obligations. DOI
ICTIR A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Temporal Dimensions in Natural Language Queries — Organizes how time appears in queries. DOI
ICTIR MedQueryIntent: A Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Medical Search Intent Classification — Benchmark for medical query intent. DOI
ICTIR Patent Representation Learning via Self-supervision — Self-supervised patent representations. DOI
ICTIR A Design Science Framework for Human-Agent Teams in Information Retrieval — Design-science view of human+agent IR. DOI
ICTIR TopicTune: A Topic Alignment Approach to Improve LLM Reasoning on Social Questions — Topic alignment to steer LLM reasoning. DOI

12 · Perspectives & position papers

SIGIR Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Towards Critical IR Theories and Practices — Critical-theory agenda for IR. DOI
SIGIR Question Answering Fit for Purpose: A Perspective From NLP and User Modeling — Perspective on purpose-fit QA. DOI
SIGIR From Search to Ask to Act: The Evolution of Information Access in the Age of Large Models and Agents — Perspective on the search-to-agent evolution. DOI
SIGIR Multi-Agentic Recommender Systems: Foundations, Perspectives, and Lessons from Large-Scale Deployments — Perspective on multi-agent recommenders. DOI

My rough classification of the ranking & retrieval papers

Roughly, the papers fell into five groups

1 Ranking has become a reasoning problem

2 Retrieval is being rebuilt for agents & deep research

3 The LLM-as-judge reckoning

4 The efficiency frontier moved to multi-vector & sparse

5 Recommendation collapses into generative retrieval — and GenAI reshapes search itself

One more thread I noticed: a learning-to-rank theory revival

The full list, grouped the way I sorted it

1 · Reasoning-first ranking & LLM rerankers

2 · Retrieval for agents, deep research, RAG & QA

3 · Evaluation, relevance judgments & LLM-as-judge

4 · Dense / sparse / multi-vector retrieval & efficiency

5 · Learning-to-rank theory, bias, click models & fairness

6 · Generative recommendation, semantic IDs & LLM recommenders

7 · Recommendation: sequential, multimodal, graph, CF, CTR & ads

8 · Multimodal, cross-modal & structured retrieval

9 · Search behavior, query & intent understanding, GenAI-vs-search

10 · Fact-checking, verification & harmful-content detection

11 · Domain, specialized retrieval & resources

12 · Perspectives & position papers

Sources & method note