Neural Retrievers are Biased Towards LLM-Generated Content

Understand

Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the paradigm of information retrieval (IR) applications, especially in web search, by generating vast amounts of human-like texts on the Internet.

• As a result, IR systems in the LLM era are facing a new challenge: the indexed documents are now not only written by human beings but also automatically generated by the LLMs.
• How these LLM-generated documents influence the IR systems is a pressing and still unexplored question.
• In this work, we conduct a quantitative evaluation of IR models in scenarios where both human-written and LLM-generated texts are involved.