MULTI3IR: A Benchmark for Multi-perspective Multi-domain Multi-modal Information Retrieval

Seokwon Song, Sohyeon Kim, Gunhee Kim


Abstract
Information retrieval (IR) increasingly targets open-ended queries that admit diverse perspectives. Existing IR benchmarks, however, focus primarily on closed-ended queries, while even open-ended benchmarks largely consist of queries whose supporting documents span a single subject domain and modality. We introduce Multi3IR, a benchmark that evaluates how well retrievers cover the multifaceted perspectives of open-ended queries across diverse domains and modalities. It comprises 104.9K Stack Exchange queries, each annotated with perspective descriptions that capture the query’s implicit viewpoints. We further propose SPIN, a parameter- and label-efficient method that learns noise vectors to steer embeddings toward diverse yet meaningful semantic directions. Experiments show that existing multimodal retrievers suffer from single-perspective bias, while SPIN substantially improves perspective coverage on Multi3IR and generalizes well to unseen open-ended IR benchmarks. The dataset and experimental code are available at https://github.com/seokwon99/Multi3IR.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2617
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
59459–59478
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2617/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seokwon Song, Sohyeon Kim, and Gunhee Kim. 2026. MULTI3IR: A Benchmark for Multi-perspective Multi-domain Multi-modal Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 59459–59478, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MULTI3IR: A Benchmark for Multi-perspective Multi-domain Multi-modal Information Retrieval (Song et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2617.pdf