lost_in_decoding_artifacts/README.md

# Lost in Decoding — Evaluation Artifacts

**Provenance:** derived evaluation artifacts created from the official MS
MARCO Dev queries and official TREC Deep Learning 2019/2020 topics, for this
paper (*Lost in Decoding? Reproducing and Stress-Testing the Look-Ahead Prior
in Generative Retrieval*, SIGIR 2026,
[DOI: 10.1145/3805712.3808567](https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3808567) ·
[arXiv:2604.23396](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23396)), not part of the
original PAG release.

The generation code and metadata here are Apache-2.0-licensed. The perturbed
query **text** is a derived artifact of the original MS MARCO / TREC-DL query
text and remains subject to the same provenance constraints as that source
text — see [`../LICENSE.md`](../LICENSE.md).

## `msmarco-dev/`, `trec-dl-2019/`, `trec-dl-2020/`

Query variations (misspelling, reordering, synonym replacement, paraphrasing,
naturality normalization) used for the RQ2 robustness evaluation, one
directory per evaluation split:

| Directory | Split | Queries |
|---|---|---|
| `msmarco-dev/` | MS MARCO Passage Ranking Dev | 6,980 |
| `trec-dl-2019/` | TREC Deep Learning 2019 passage-ranking topics | 43 |
| `trec-dl-2020/` | TREC Deep Learning 2020 passage-ranking topics | 54 |

Each directory contains one TSV file per perturbation type:
`misspelling.tsv`, `reordering.tsv`, `synonym.tsv`, `paraphrase.tsv`,
`naturality.tsv`.

**Columns:** `qid`, `original_query`, `perturbed_query`, `perturbation`, `seed`

```text
qid    original_query    perturbed_query    perturbation    seed
1037798    who is robert gray    who is robrt gray    misspelling    42
```

- **Seeded perturbations** (`misspelling`, `reordering`, `synonym`,
  `paraphrase`): five seeds — `1999`, `5`, `27`, `2016`, `2026` — stacked as
  separate rows per `qid` within the same file.
- **`naturality`:** a deterministic style-normalization rule rather than a
  randomized perturbation, so it produces identical output for every seed.
  Represented as a single row per `qid` with `seed=deterministic` rather than
  five duplicate rows.

`msmarco-dev/original_qids.txt` lists the 6,980 Dev query IDs covered by
these files (a subset of the full MS MARCO Dev qrel set).

Implemented in
[`robustness/query_variations/penha/`](https://github.com/kidist-amde/lost-in-decoding/tree/main/robustness/query_variations/penha)
in the code repository.

## `metadata/`

- `generation_config.json`: perturbation types, split sizes, file format, and provenance.
- `seeds.json`: seed values and which perturbations use them.

## `data_download/`

The original MS MARCO passage collection, MS MARCO Dev queries/qrels, and
TREC-DL 2019/2020 topics/qrels are **not** redistributed in this repository.
Scripts to fetch them directly from their official sources (Microsoft,
NIST) are provided at the repository root:

```bash
git clone https://huggingface.co/kiyam/lost-in-decoding-pag
cd lost-in-decoding-pag
bash data_download/prepare_evaluation_data.sh
```

See [`../data_download/`](../data_download/) for individual per-dataset
scripts and checksums.

## Citation

If you use these artifacts, please cite:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{mekonnen2026lost,
  title     = {Lost in Decoding? Reproducing and Stress-Testing the Look-Ahead Prior in Generative Retrieval},
  author    = {Mekonnen, Kidist Amde and Li, Yongkang and Tang, Yubao and Lupart, Simon and de Rijke, Maarten},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval},
  pages     = {2994--3005},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.1145/3805712.3808567}
}
```