Qilin: A Multimodal Information Retrieval Dataset with APP-level User Sessions

User-generated content (UGC) communities, especially those featuring multimodal content, improve user experiences by integrating visual and textual information into results (or items). The challenge of improving user experiences in complex systems with search and recommendation (S&R) services has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry these years. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has limited the research progress on multimodal S&R. To address the growing need for developing better S&R services, we present a novel multimodal information retrieval dataset in this paper, namely Qilin. The dataset is collected from Xiaohongshu, a popular social platform with over 300 million monthly active users and an average search penetration rate of over 70%. In contrast to existing datasets, textsfQilin offers a comprehensive collection of user sessions with heterogeneous results like image-text notes, video notes, commercial notes, and direct answers, facilitating the development of advanced multimodal neural retrieval models across diverse task settings. To better model user satisfaction and support the analysis of heterogeneous user behaviors, we also collect extensive APP-level contextual signals and genuine user feedback. Notably, Qilin contains user-favored answers and their referred results for search requests triggering the Deep Query Answering (DQA) module. This allows not only the training & evaluation of a Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but also the exploration of how such a module would affect users' search behavior. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we provide interesting findings and insights for further improving S&R systems. We hope that textsfQilin will significantly contribute to the advancement of multimodal content platforms with S&R services in the future.