ReNeuIR 2024: Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval

The third workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval (ReNeuIR) will be held at SIGIR 2024 in Washington D.C. with support for remote participation.

Topics of Interest

We welcome both “full” and “poster” submissions on the following topics, including but not limited to:

• ReNeuIR 2024 will host an efficiency oriented shared task, all participants are invited to submit papers describing their approches and evaluating them.
• Novel Neural IR (NIR) models that reach competitive quality but are designed to provide fast training or fast inference;
• Efficient NIR models for decentralized IR tasks such as conversational search;
• Strategies to speed up training or inference of existing NIR models;
• Sample-efficient training of NIR models;
• Efficiency-driven distillation, pruning, quantization, retraining, and transfer learning;
• Empirical investigation of the complexity of existing NIR models through an analysis of quality, interpretability, robustness, and environmental impact; and,
• Evaluation protocols for efficiency in NIR.

Submission Guidelines and Review Process

All submissions must be in English (PDF format) and formatted according to the single column CEUR-ART paper style. Unlike the main conference we do NOT require submissions to be anonymous.

We welcome poster proposals of up to 6 pages long, and articles between 10 and 20 pages long, excluding references.

Articles are expected to describe significant work towards efficient neural information access systems as described in the topics of interest. Furthermore, we welcome extensions or revisions of published articles.

Poster proposals are expected to describe work in progress, late-breaking results, new original ideas and research vision, or any work which is better communicated through a visual, interactive format. Please note, however, that we discourage posters which describe work at the proposal stage; we expect at least some experimental analysis.

All submissions will go through a single-blind peer review process by the program committee and judged on the basis of their relevance to the theme of the workshop and the depth of their technical contribution. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings (CEUR proceedings).

Submissions should be made electronically via EasyChair.

Important Dates (Research Papers)

Submission deadline: May 15, 2024

Notification of acceptance: June 7, 2024

Workshop: July 18, 2024

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“Anywhere on Earth”).

Shared Task Synopsis

The shared task invites the submission of retrieval pipelines (or parts thereof) that implement the follow the basic steps (1) index, (2) retrieve, (3) and re-rank. Participants can submit their retrieval pipelines in the form of source code repositories or as Docker images. We encourage code submissions where participants organize their code in (private) GitHub repositories. Submitted pipelines are then executed automatically with different workloads sampled from ir_datasets, using TIRA / TIREx and Scaphandre to measure both their effectiveness and efficiency.

More specifically, TIRA runs submitted retrieval pipelines on datasets derived from the MS MARCO passage dataset. To simulated different worklods, the number of queries and passages to be indexed are varied. By reusing the MS MARCO passage dataset, we lower the barrier to entry, as many retrieval systems already exist for this test collection, allowing participants to focus on efficiency. With this in mind, for the first iteration of the shared task in 2024, our focus is on submitting pre-trained systems that batch-process the entire dataset.

After the shared task, we will make all collected run files together with Scaphandre traces of their execution available to foster the development of new performance measures that incorporate efficiency and effectiveness.

Important Dates (Shared Task)

Submissions to the shared task form part of the workshop. We will have an oral presentation deadline before the workshop, so that approaches submitted by that deadline can present their submissions at the workshop, and a final proceedings deadline that welcomes existing and potentially new submissions after the workshop that will be included into the workshop proceedings.

Oral Presentation deadline: June 26, 2024

Workshop: July 18, 2024

Final Proceedings Deadline: July 31, 2024

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“Anywhere on Earth”).

Contact

For any questions please do not hesitate to contact us via the forum or via mail at reneuir2024 [at] easychair [dot] org.