# TEMPO: A Realistic Multi-Domain Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [BRIGHT: A Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12883/) (2024)
- [A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06314/) (2021)
- [ReasonIR: Training Retrievers for Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20595/) (2025)
- [DIVER: A Multi-Stage Approach for Reasoning-intensive Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07995/) (2025)
- [RAR-b: Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06347/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Literature Review of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Techniques, Metrics, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06401/) (2025)
- [TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21024/) (2025)
- [TIME: A Multi-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12891/) (2025)
- [It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20243/) (2025)
- [Rankify: A Comprehensive Python Toolkit for Retrieval, Re-Ranking, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02464/) (2025)
- [A Study into Investigating Temporal Robustness of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17073/) (2025)
- [DeAR: Dual-Stage Document Reranking with Reasoning Agents via LLM Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16998/) (2025)
- [SustainableQA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset for Corporate Sustainability and EU Taxonomy Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03000/) (2025)
- [HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12720/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Are LLM-Based Retrievers Worth Their Cost? An Empirical Study of Efficiency, Robustness, and Reasoning Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03676/) (2026)
- [The Magnitude Mirage: Rethinking Confidence for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15578/) (2026)
- [MARVEL: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning-intensiVe Expand-rerank and retrievaL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07079/) (2026)
- [BRIDGE: Multimodal-to-Text Retrieval via Reinforcement-Learned Query Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07201/) (2026)
- [HIVE: Query, Hypothesize, Verify An LLM Framework for Multimodal Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07220/) (2026)
- [BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08834/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing temporal QA benchmarks focus on simple fact-seeking queries from news corpora, while reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks lack temporal grounding. However, real-world information needs often require reasoning about temporal evolution and synthesizing evidence across time periods. We introduce TEMPO, the first benchmark combining temporal reasoning with reasoning-intensive retrieval across 13 domains. TEMPO features: (1) 1,730 complex queries requiring deep temporal reasoning such as tracking changes, identifying trends, or comparing cross-period evidence; (2) step-wise retrieval planning with 3,976 decomposed steps and gold documents mapped to each step for multi-hop evaluation; and (3) novel temporal metrics including Temporal Coverage@k and Temporal Precision@k measuring whether results span required time periods. Evaluation of 12 retrieval systems reveals substantial challenges: the best model (DiVeR) achieves only 32.0 NDCG@10 and 71.4% Temporal Coverage@10, demonstrating difficulty in retrieving temporally complete evidence. We believe TEMPO provides a challenging benchmark for improving temporal reasoning in retrieval and RAG systems. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tempo-bench/Tempo. See also our official website: https://tempo-bench.github.io/.