Reliable Evaluation Protocol for Low-Precision Retrieval

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission3175 Authors

Keywords: passage retrieval, dense retrieval, re-ranking, metrics, evaluation methodologies

Abstract: Lowering the numerical precision of model parameters and computations is widely adopted to improve the efficiency of retrieval systems. However, when computing relevance scores between the query and documents in low-precision, we observe spurious ties due to the reduced granularity. This introduces high variability in the results based on tie resolution, making the evaluation less reliable. To address this, we propose a more robust retrieval evaluation protocol designed to reduce score variation. It consists of: (1) High-Precision Scoring (HPS), which upcasts the final scoring step to higher precision to resolve tied candidates with minimal computational cost; and (2) Tie-aware Retrieval Metrics (TRM), which report expected scores, range, and bias to quantify order uncertainty of tied candidates. Our experiments test multiple models with three scoring functions on twelve retrieval datasets to demonstrate that HPS dramatically reduces tie-induced instability, and TRM accurately recovers expected metric values. This combination enables a more consistent and reliable evaluation system for lower-precision retrieval.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Information Extraction and Retrieval

Research Area Keywords: passage retrieval, dense retrieval, re-ranking, metrics, evaluation methodologies

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3175