Beyond Content Relevance: Evaluating Instruction Following in Retrieval Models

Instruction-following capabilities in large language models (LLMs) have significantly progressed, enabling more complex user interactions through detailed prompts. However, retrieval systems have not matched these advances, most of them still relies on traditional lexical and semantic matching techniques that fail to fully capture user intent. Recent efforts have introduced instruction-aware retrieval models, but these primarily focus on intrinsic content relevance, which neglects the importance of customized preferences for broader document-level attributes. This study evaluates the instruction-following capabilities of various retrieval models beyond content relevance, including LLM-based dense retrieval and reranking models. We develop InfoSearch, a novel retrieval evaluation benchmark spanning six document-level attributes: Audience, Keyword, Format, Language, Length, and Source, and introduce novel metrics -- Strict Instruction Compliance Ratio (SICR) and Weighted Instruction Sensitivity Evaluation (WISE) to accurately assess the models' responsiveness to instructions. Our findings reveal that while reranking models generally surpass retrieval models in instruction following, they still face challenges in handling certain attributes. Moreover, although instruction fine-tuning and increased model size lead to better performance, most models fall short of achieving comprehensive instruction compliance as assessed by our benchmark.

RSL-SQL: Robust Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL Generation

Text-to-SQL generation aims to translate natural language questions into SQL statements. In large language models (LLMs) based Text-to-SQL, schema linking is a widely adopted strategy to streamline the input for LLMs by selecting only relevant schema elements, therefore reducing noise and computational overhead. However, schema linking faces risks that requires caution, including the potential omission of necessary elements and disruption of database structural integrity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called RSL-SQL that combines bidirectional schema linking, contextual information augmentation, binary selection strategy, and multi-turn self-correction. Our approach improves the recall of schema linking through forward and backward pruning and hedges the risk by voting between full schema and contextual information augmented simplified schema. Experiments on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy among open-source solutions, with 67.2% on BIRD and 87.9% on Spider using GPT-4o. Furthermore, our approach outperforms a series of GPT-4 based Text-to-SQL systems when adopting DeepSeek (much cheaper) with same intact prompts. Extensive analysis and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in our framework. The codes are available at https://github.com/Laqcce-cao/RSL-SQL.