Canjia Li


2026

Due to the dynamically evolving nature of real-world query streams, relevance models struggle to generalize to practical search scenarios. A sophisticated solution is self-evolution techniques. However, in large-scale industrial settings with massive query streams, this technique faces two challenges: (1) informative samples are often sparse and difficult to identify, and (2) pseudo-labels generated by the current model could be unreliable. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a Self-Evolving Relevance Model approach (SERM), which comprises two complementary multi-agent modules: a multi-agent sample miner, designed to detect distributional shifts and identify informative training samples, and a multi-agent relevance annotator, which provides reliable labels through a two-level agreement framework. We evaluated SERM on a large-scale industrial platform, which serves billions of user requests daily. Experimental results demonstrate that SERM can achieve significant performance gains through iterative self-evolution, as validated by extensive offline multilingual evaluations and online testing.

2018

Pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) is commonly used to boost the performance of traditional information retrieval (IR) models by using top-ranked documents to identify and weight new query terms, thereby reducing the effect of query-document vocabulary mismatches. While neural retrieval models have recently demonstrated strong results for ad-hoc retrieval, combining them with PRF is not straightforward due to incompatibilities between existing PRF approaches and neural architectures. To bridge this gap, we propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed NPRF framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models.