# QUARK: Robust Retrieval under Non-Faithful Queries via Query-Anchored Aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [Multi-Stage Document Ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14424/) (2019)
- [Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06554/) (2019)
- [Query expansion techniques for information retrieval: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00247/) (2017)
- [Towards Robust Ranker for Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08063/) (2022)
- [Generative Query Reformulation for Effective Adhoc Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00415/) (2023)
- [Utilizing BERT for Information Retrieval: Survey, Applications, Resources, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00784/) (2024)
- [R-Bot: An LLM-based Query Rewrite System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01661/) (2024)
- [Phonetic-and-Semantic Embedding of Spoken Words with Applications in Spoken Content Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08089/) (2018)
- [Query Understanding via Intent Description Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10889/) (2020)
- [Perturbation-Invariant Adversarial Training for Neural Ranking Models: Improving the Effectiveness-Robustness Trade-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10329/) (2023)
- [Towards Effective Paraphrasing for Information Disguise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05018/) (2023)
- [Sparse and Dense Retrievers Learn Better Together: Joint Sparse-Dense Optimization for Text-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16707/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

User queries in real-world retrieval are often non-faithful (noisy, incomplete, or distorted), causing retrievers to fail when key semantics are missing. We formalize this as retrieval under recall noise, where the observed query is drawn from a noisy recall process of a latent target item. To address this, we propose QUARK, a simple yet effective training-free framework for robust retrieval under non-faithful queries. QUARK explicitly models query uncertainty through recovery hypotheses, i.e., multiple plausible interpretations of the latent intent given the observed query, and introduces query-anchored aggregation to combine their signals robustly. The original query serves as a semantic anchor, while recovery hypotheses provide controlled auxiliary evidence, preventing semantic drift and hypothesis hijacking. This design enables QUARK to improve recall and ranking quality without sacrificing robustness, even when some hypotheses are noisy or uninformative. Across controlled simulations and BEIR benchmarks (FIQA, SciFact, NFCorpus) with both sparse and dense retrievers, QUARK improves Recall, MRR, and nDCG over the base retriever. Ablations show QUARK is robust to the number of recovery hypotheses and that anchored aggregation outperforms unanchored max/mean/median pooling. These results demonstrate that modeling query uncertainty through recovery hypotheses, coupled with principled anchored aggregation, is essential for robust retrieval under non-faithful queries.