Genetic Generative Information Retrieval

Abstract

Documents come in all shapes and sizes and are created by many different means, including now-a-days, generative language models. We demonstrate that a simple genetic algorithm can improve generative information retrieval by using a document's text as a genetic representation, a relevance model as a fitness function, and a large language model as a genetic operator that introduces diversity through random changes to the text to produce new documents. By "mutating" highly-relevant documents and "crossing over" content between documents, we produce new documents of greater relevance to a user's information need --- validated in terms of estimated relevance scores from various models and via a preliminary human evaluation. We also identify challenges that demand further study.