Paper v1, submitted 30 October 2026; method-paragraph retrieval and explicitly labeled alternative settings.
What must be retrieved?
Rank experimental-method paragraphs by joint constraint satisfaction. The queries specify 3–5 requirements; matching values scattered across different experimental variants does not qualify.
ProSearch paper v1 · Official ProSearch code and reproduction instructions
Queries, domains and evidence
The evaluation has 1,515 queries across six laboratory domains. Each domain supplies paragraph pools, queries and relevance judgments. Thirty-six generated queries without judgments were excluded.
How to reproduce the evaluation
The author scripts encode queries and paragraphs, save retrieval runs, then score against qrels. Choose raw queries and the method-paragraph pool for the main setting; full-body retrieval changes the corpus.
Official ProSearch code and reproduction instructions · Official ProSearch dataset and files
Read the score with its setting
nDCG@10 evaluates the top ten ranks. The primary series uses the stated arithmetic mean across six domains, preserving decimals. Query and reranking configurations remain explicit; diagnostic and corpus-shift results appear separately below.
ProSearch paper v1 · Official ProSearch code and reproduction instructions
All 19 first-stage retrievers
The complete original-query results retain all six domains. The comparable primary series uses the average column.
| Retriever | Cell culture | Immunotechnology | Electrochemistry | Organic synthesis | Inorganic materials | Polymer materials | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BM25 | 0.136 | 0.011 | 0.079 | 0.132 | 0.217 | 0.297 | 0.145 |
| Sentence-BERT | 0.082 | 0.012 | 0.064 | 0.122 | 0.263 | 0.065 | 0.101 |
| GTE-large | 0.222 | 0.041 | 0.127 | 0.184 | 0.441 | 0.182 | 0.199 |
| BGE-M3 | 0.254 | 0.025 | 0.106 | 0.216 | 0.369 | 0.326 | 0.216 |
| Harrier-OSS-v1-0.6B | 0.261 | 0.049 | 0.159 | 0.198 | 0.467 | 0.177 | 0.219 |
| NV-Embed-v2 | 0.358 | 0.070 | 0.184 | 0.290 | 0.448 | 0.310 | 0.277 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 0.386 | 0.092 | 0.175 | 0.282 | 0.495 | 0.309 | 0.290 |
| MatSciBERT | 0.011 | 0.003 | 0.001 | 0.013 | 0.002 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| ChemicalBERT-uncased | 0.043 | 0.001 | 0.027 | 0.026 | 0.040 | 0.055 | 0.032 |
| SPECTER2 | 0.077 | 0.005 | 0.003 | 0.069 | 0.157 | 0.060 | 0.062 |
| SciNCL | 0.098 | 0.034 | 0.036 | 0.099 | 0.190 | 0.020 | 0.080 |
| PubMedBERT-base-embeddings | 0.069 | 0.001 | 0.039 | 0.104 | 0.213 | 0.059 | 0.081 |
| BioClinical-ModernBERT | 0.142 | 0.011 | 0.053 | 0.093 | 0.272 | 0.084 | 0.109 |
| ChEmbed-prog | 0.161 | 0.007 | 0.056 | 0.179 | 0.401 | 0.147 | 0.158 |
| ReasonIR-8B | 0.079 | 0.006 | 0.021 | 0.120 | 0.092 | 0.043 | 0.060 |
| INF-X-Retriever | 0.295 | 0.039 | 0.134 | 0.208 | 0.328 | 0.193 | 0.200 |
| ReasonEmbed | 0.268 | 0.066 | 0.150 | 0.201 | 0.425 | 0.164 | 0.212 |
| BGE-Reasoner-Embed | 0.285 | 0.069 | 0.152 | 0.240 | 0.435 | 0.215 | 0.233 |
| DIVER-Retriever | 0.284 | 0.072 | 0.170 | 0.262 | 0.476 | 0.267 | 0.255 |
Domain columns are separate subsets. Only the six-domain average enters the reported-results series. Values remain decimals.
Query formulations with one retriever
Every row uses Qwen3-Embedding-8B and the method-paragraph corpus. Query expansion changes the input, not the model checkpoint.
| Query formulation | Cell culture | Immunotechnology | Electrochemistry | Organic synthesis | Inorganic materials | Polymer materials | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original | 0.386 | 0.092 | 0.175 | 0.282 | 0.495 | 0.309 | 0.290 |
| Query Decomposition | 0.317 | 0.068 | 0.091 | 0.205 | 0.454 | 0.254 | 0.232 |
| Structured Query | 0.324 | 0.080 | 0.138 | 0.250 | 0.494 | 0.189 | 0.246 |
| INF-Query-Aligner | 0.382 | 0.075 | 0.141 | 0.233 | 0.487 | 0.196 | 0.252 |
| HyDE | 0.359 | 0.098 | 0.154 | 0.262 | 0.501 | 0.255 | 0.272 |
| TongSearch-QR | 0.385 | 0.092 | 0.172 | 0.265 | 0.505 | 0.288 | 0.285 |
| Reasoning-augmented | 0.408 | 0.111 | 0.179 | 0.309 | 0.494 | 0.359 | 0.310 |
| DIVER-QExpand | 0.374 | 0.117 | 0.205 | 0.327 | 0.558 | 0.318 | 0.317 |
The Original row repeats the baseline for reference; it is not duplicated in the primary series.
What changes after reranking?
Rerankers reorder Qwen3-Embedding-8B’s top 100 candidates. Their scores include that first-stage retrieval; they are not standalone retriever scores.
| Retriever | Cell culture | Immunotechnology | Electrochemistry | Organic synthesis | Inorganic materials | Polymer materials | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 0.386 | 0.092 | 0.175 | 0.282 | 0.495 | 0.309 | 0.290 |
| BGE-Reranker-v2-m3 | 0.481 | 0.192 | 0.247 | 0.336 | 0.705 | 0.416 | 0.396 |
| Rank-R1 | 0.521 | 0.227 | 0.269 | 0.408 | 0.622 | 0.478 | 0.421 |
| Rank1 | 0.592 | 0.266 | 0.241 | 0.416 | 0.598 | 0.457 | 0.428 |
| DIVER-GroupRank-7B | 0.586 | 0.255 | 0.262 | 0.468 | 0.705 | 0.531 | 0.468 |
| ReasonRank-8B | 0.577 | 0.276 | 0.314 | 0.483 | 0.637 | 0.547 | 0.472 |
| Qwen3-Reranker | 0.579 | 0.301 | 0.294 | 0.485 | 0.692 | 0.490 | 0.474 |
Domain columns are separate subsets. Only the six-domain average enters the reported-results series. Values remain decimals.
Changing the candidate corpus
Full-body retrieval is harder because it includes paragraphs outside the methods section. These are separate corpus settings, displayed outside the main method-paragraph series.
| Retriever | Method-only nDCG@10 | All-body nDCG@10 |
|---|---|---|
| BM25 | 0.145 | 0.089 |
| BGE-Reasoner-Embed | 0.233 | 0.164 |
| NV-Embed-v2 | 0.277 | 0.197 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 0.290 | 0.206 |
Preserves the four directly reported average pairs.
Open-world search on 30 queries
This small experiment samples five queries from each domain. Its success, precision and reciprocal-rank metrics have different meanings from nDCG@10.
| Method | Success@10 | P@10 | MRR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily Search | 0.300 | 0.077 | 0.209 |
| Tavily Agent | 0.800 | 0.353 | 0.694 |
No values from this table enter the nDCG@10 series.
Structured information diagnostic
Structured matches query constraints within one extracted protocol record and averages 20 randomized tie orderings. Hybrid breaks ties with Qwen3-Embedding-8B. Both consume extracted protocol information and are not text-only retriever baselines.
| Method | Cell culture | Electrochemistry | Immunotechnology | Inorganic materials | Organic synthesis | Polymer materials | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 0.386 | 0.175 | 0.092 | 0.495 | 0.282 | 0.309 | 0.290 |
| Structured Diagnostic | 0.789 | 0.698 | 0.682 | 0.875 | 0.773 | 0.829 | 0.774 |
| Hybrid Diagnostic | 0.858 | 0.741 | 0.723 | 0.910 | 0.795 | 0.859 | 0.814 |
Diagnostic values are shown separately and excluded from the main results series. Note the source-specific domain order.
Constraint-role subsets
Queries are split by whether Condition or Method constraints are present. Each cell is a subset mean across six domains, not the full-query-set average.
| Retriever | Condition absent | Condition present | Method absent | Method present |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BM25 | 0.181 | 0.136 | 0.132 | 0.159 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 0.356 | 0.285 | 0.288 | 0.293 |
Qwen3 is expanded to the checkpoint identified in the source caption. Subsets are excluded from the primary series.
What this does not establish
Templates and LLM-assisted pooled judgments can miss real needs or relevant paragraphs. Expert label agreement was 89.1%. Coverage is limited to selected procedures and single-paragraph evidence, not complete experimental reproducibility.
Version and model identity
The publication date is the v1 submission date. Checkpoints follow Appendix C.1/C.3; per-run dates are not provided. No later leaderboard values were substituted.