Participatory Auditing for PRF Failures

_reachsumit · x · 2026-07-15

This paper discusses when PRF (pseudo-relevance feedback) fails and proposes a participatory auditing framework to identify which queries are negatively impacted by PRF.

The core idea is to first identify query types where "PRF worsens results" through participatory user research, then train an LLM reranker to learn these user preferences for selective query expansion.

The author emphasizes that this approach doesn't blindly apply expansion to all queries. Instead, it audits first to decide which queries should use PRF, thereby minimizing negative impacts on specific searches.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →