# On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18768 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18768/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Dec 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18583/) (2025)
- [BroadGen: A Framework for Generating Effective and Efficient Advertiser Broad Match Keyphrase Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19164/) (2025)
- [Lost in Decoding? Reproducing and Stress-Testing the Look-Ahead Prior in Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23396/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative information retrieval methods retrieve documents by directly generating their identifiers. Much effort has been devoted to developing effective generative IR models. Less attention has been paid to the robustness of these models. It is critical to assess the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of generative IR models, i.e., how would such models generalize to new distributions? To answer this question, we focus on OOD scenarios from four perspectives in retrieval problems: (i)query variations; (ii)unseen query types; (iii)unseen tasks; and (iv)corpus expansion. Based on this taxonomy, we conduct empirical studies to analyze the OOD robustness of representative generative IR models against dense retrieval models. Our empirical results indicate that the OOD robustness of generative IR models is in need of improvement. By inspecting the OOD robustness of generative IR models we aim to contribute to the development of more reliable IR models. The code is available at urlhttps://github.com/Davion-Liu/GROOD.