Cited by 3Information Retrieval and Search BehaviorTopic ModelingNatural Language Processing Techniques

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 21 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 21 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

An Instruction-Response Perspective on Large Language Models in Information Retrieval Tasks

Open access
Joho, Hideo, Jose, Joemon M·2025·Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Abstract

The increasing use of retrieval-augmented applications, where large language models (LLMs) are instructed to generate queries, assess relevance, and synthesise responses, has introduced new challenges in Information Retrieval (IR).The lack of transparency in LLMs means that even subtle variations in instructions can significantly impact the quality, consistency, and reliability of their responses.To address this issue, we propose Instruction-Response Study, an experimental framework for systematically analysing how task instructions influence LLM-generated responses in IR tasks.This paper presents the core components of the framework and demonstrates its utility through four case studies, examining 1) the effect of IR tasks on query formulation, 2) the impact of topic information size on retrieval effectiveness, 3) the reproducibility of LLM-generated queries, and 4) the role of meta-instructions in diversifying instruction design.The findings highlight how the proposed framework enables controlled experimentation on instruction design and its effects, offering a foundation for optimising prompt engineering and enhancing retrieval-augmented applications.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper proposes Instruction-Response Study, an experimental framework for analysing how task instructions shape LLM-generated responses in IR tasks, and demonstrates it through four case studies on query formulation. It finds that instruction design, model choice, topic information, and reproducibility all materially affect generated queries and retrieval performance, though many effects are small or not statistically significant.

Key findings

  • In Case Study 1, LLM-generated queries averaged 13–26 words; recall-oriented queries were longest and precision-oriented shortest, with gpt4o-mini producing the longest queries and qwen2.5 the shortest. Two-way ANOVA showed significant main effects of Task and Model on query length but no interaction; effect size was small for Task (η² = 0.024) and large for Model (η² = 0.225).
  • In Case Study 2, retrieval effectiveness (nDCG@1000) tended to decrease as more topic information was included in the instruction, with exceptions in TN and TDN for gpt4o-mini and llama3.3; description information appeared to contribute more than narrative. Topic Information and Model had significant main effects but no interaction, with small effect sizes (Topic η² = 0.043; Model η² = 0.055).
  • In Case Study 3, no variance values were zero across ten identical instructions, and proprietary models showed greater inconsistency than open-weight models, reaching up to 15× in DocID variance (gemini1.5 0.109 vs. llama3.3 0.007). A one-way ANOVA on query variance was significant (F = 23.46, p = 0.00), with a large Model effect size (η² = 0.264).
  • In Case Study 4, the simple initial instruction was consistently among the top three; some diversified instructions scored higher, e.g. median nDCG rose from 0.061 to 0.107 for qwen2.5 (with score) in high-recall and median MRR rose from 0.011 to 0.066 for llama3.3 (with score) in high-precision, but Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests found none of these differences statistically significant.

Methods

  • The paper is a perspective paper introducing the Instruction-Response Study framework, whose components include IR tasks, test collections, instructions, LLMs, tools, responses, and measurements; four case studies apply it primarily to query formulation.
  • Case studies use 50 topics from the TREC 2005 Robust Track and the Aquaint collection indexed with OpenSearch 2.18.0 using Lucene query syntax and BM25; four LLMs are tested: gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gemini-1.5-flash, llama3.3:70b-instruct-q4_K_M, and qwen2.5:72b-instruct-q4_K_M, with temperature 0.0.
  • Analyses include descriptive statistics, two-way ANOVA with Tukey HSD, one-way ANOVA, and Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests; Case 2 and 3 retrieve top 1,000 documents and use nDCG@1000, Case 3 repeats instructions ten times and measures query-string, top-ranked document, and MRR inconsistency, and Case 4 splits topics into 25 training and 25 validation topics with a meta-instruction feedback loop over N = 10 epochs.

Limitations

  • The paper states that the case studies are not exhaustive or fully generalisable, that findings should not be overgeneralised, that alternative ranking models such as DPR could be tested, that meta-instruction design could be further diversified and evaluated, and that self-correction and self-contrast methods are promising future directions.
  • The paper also states that the LLMs may have been pre-trained on datasets including the document collections and topic descriptions used, and that no measures were implemented to control for potential data leakage.
  • Evident from the text: the case studies focus mainly on query formulation, use one test collection (50 TREC 2005 Robust topics) and four LLMs, and report small effect sizes for topic information and no statistically significant improvements from diversified instructions in Case Study 4.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3726302.3730346

Cites

21 of 21 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 of 21 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged

Show all 39 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 24
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 18
37 of 37
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The experimental flow assumes the presence of a set of search topics, a document collection indexed by a retrieval tool, and corresponding qrels.

    “Here, we assume the presence of a set of search topics, a document collection indexed by a retrieval tool, and corresponding qrels.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Reproducibility of GII responses is more critical when accuracy is prioritised over exhaustivity or diversity.

    “Since the reproducibility of GII responses is more critical when accuracy is prioritised over exhaustivity or diversity, this case study focuses on high-precision retrieval.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Providing a rich set of topic information to GIIs is not always feasible.

    “While providing a rich set of topic information to GIIs may be ideal, it is not always feasible.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Prompt design for retrieval components is critical to the quality of downstream tasks.

    “For retrieval-augmented applications, prompt design for retrieval components is critical to the quality of downstream tasks.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The role of users in IR systems is expanding beyond humans and bots to include LLM-based agents.

    “The role of users in IR systems is expanding beyond humans and bots to include LLM-based agents.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs function as black boxes, and their underlying mechanisms for search-related actions remain largely unexplored.

    “However, like human users, LLMs function as black boxes, and their underlying mechanisms for search-related actions remain largely unexplored.”
6 of 6

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • ir_datasets citation points to a different paper

    Minor

    The text cites reference 21 for ir_datasets, but reference 21 is a paper on Retrieval-Augmented Generation; the ir_datasets entry is numbered 22.

  • Framework has both six and seven components

    Minor

    The section says the framework consists of six components, but it labels measurements as the seventh and final component.

  • Query-length range excludes a reported mean

    Minor

    The stated upper bound is 26 words, but Table 1 reports a mean of 26.84 words for gpt4o-mini in the recall task.

3 of 3

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 17 references

Research works printed but not linked: 9

  1. Akari Asai, Zeqiu Wu, Yizhong Wang, Avirup Sil, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2024. Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. https://openreview.net/forum?id=hSyW5go0v8
  2. Leonard Bereska and Stratis Gavves. 2024. Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety - A Review. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2024). https://openreview.net/forum?id=ePUVetPKu6 Survey Certification, Expert Certification.
  3. Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Chris Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, and Dario Amodei. 2020. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, H. Larochelle, M. Ranzato, R. Hadsell, M.F. Balcan, and H. Lin (Eds.), Vol. 33. Curran Associates, Inc., 1877-1901. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/file/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Paper.pdf
  4. Alibaba Cloud. 2025. Qwen: Generative AI Solutions by Alibaba Cloud. https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/solutions/generative-ai/qwen Accessed: 2025-02-14.
  5. Jie Huang, Xinyun Chen, Swaroop Mishra, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Adams Wei Yu, Xinying Song, and Denny Zhou. 2024. Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. https://openreview.net/forum?id=IkmD3fKBPQ
  6. Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, and Douwe Kiela. 2020. Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, H. Larochelle, M. Ranzato, R. Hadsell, M.F. Balcan, and H. Lin (Eds.), Vol. 33. Curran Associates, Inc., 9459-9474. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/file/6b493230205f780e1bc26945df7481e5-Paper.pdf
  7. Stephen E. Robertson, Steve Walker, Susan Jones, Micheline Hancock-Beaulieu, and Mike Gatford. 1994. Okapi at TREC-3. In Proceedings of The Third Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 1994, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, November 2-4, 1994 (NIST Special Publication, Vol. 500-225), Donna K. Harman (Ed.). National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 109-126. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec3/papers/city.ps.gz
  8. Chenglei Si, Diyi Yang, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. 2025. Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100 NLP Researchers. In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations. https://openreview.net/forum?id=M23dTGWCZy
  9. 10.5555/3600270.3602070 · DOI

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Metadata

Authors
Joho, H., & Jose, J. M.
Affiliations
  • University of Tsukuba (JP)
  • University of Glasgow (GB)
Venue
Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Publisher
ACM
Published
2025-07-13
Pages
3843-3852
OpenAlex
W4412378020
Cited by
3
References
17
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1
FWCI
1.64
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (publishedVersion)
  • ENLIGHTEN (Jurnal Bimbingan dan Konseling Islam) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP24K03048)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, query generation, prompt engineering, instructional design, information retrieval evaluation

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