IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval

Table of Contents

• Updates
• Overview
• Mteb
• Preparation
• Experiments
• Citation

🔥 Updates

• [06/2025] 🎉 We are delighted that IFIR has been integrated into the MTEB benchmark and is now available for evaluation.
• [03/2025] Paper IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval is released.
• [03/2025] Datasets for IFIR are available on HuggingFace.

📣 Overview

🚀 MTEB

IFIR has been integrated into the MTEB benchmark v2.0.0 branch and is now available for evaluation. You can use the following code to evaluate your model on IFIR:

import mteb
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
import torch

# Define the sentence-transformers model name
def main(args):
    model_name = args.model_name
    model = SentenceTransformer(
         model_name,
         model_kwargs={'torch_dtype': torch.float16},
         device=args.device,
         trust_remote_code=True
    )
    tasks = mteb.get_tasks(tasks=["IFIRFiQA", "IFIRFire", "IFIRAila",  "IFIRNFCorpus", "IFIRCds", "IFIRPm", "IFIRScifact"])
    evaluation = mteb.MTEB(tasks=tasks)
    model_name = args.model_name.split("/")[-1]
    results = evaluation.run(model, output_folder=f"results/{model_name}", encode_kwargs={"batch_size":2}, co2_tracker=False)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from argparse import ArgumentParser
    parser = ArgumentParser(description="Run MTEB evaluation with a specified model.")
    parser.add_argument("--model_name", type=str, help="Name of the sentence-transformers model to evaluate.")
    parser.add_argument("--device", type=str, help="device")
    args = parser.parse_args()
    main(args)

🔨 Preparation

Enviroment

pip install -r requirements.txt

Dataset

Download from huggingface and extract it to datasets folder in the root dir within following structure:

You can use the following script to download the dataset:

git clone https://huggingface.co/datasets/songtingyu/IFIR/
mv IFIR datasets

datasets
├── fiqa
│   ├── fiqa-query.json
│   ├── fiqa-corpus.jsonl
│   ├── fiqa-qrel.jsonl
│   ├── test_data.json
├── aila
│   ├── aila-query.json
│   ├── aila-corpus.jsonl
│   ├── aila-qrel.jsonl
│   ├── test_data.json
├── fire
│   ├── fire-query.json
│   ├── fire-corpus.jsonl
│   ├── fire-qrel.jsonl
│   ├── test_data.json
├── ...

💻 Experiments

Experiments

If you want to use BEIR for evaluation, please follow the README in the beir folder. And to reproduce the results in the paper, please follow the following steps:

1. Start the elasticsearch

wget -O elasticsearch-8.11.1.tar.gz https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-8.11.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xzf elasticsearch-8.11.1.tar.gz
cd elasticsearch-8.11.1
./bin/elasticsearch

2. Embed the dataset and evaluate the model

sh scripts/embed.sh [model_name] [dataset_name] [batch_size] [device] # embed the dataset for the model
sh scripts/eval.sh [model_name] [dataset_name] [top_k] [device] # calculate the statistical metrics

For InstFol metrics, please follow the following steps:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=[your_openai_api_key]
sh scripts/llm_eval_pre.sh [model_name] [dataset_name] [top_k] [device] # prepare the intermediate results for InstFol metrics
sh scripts/llm_eval.sh [model_name] [dataset_name] [top_k] [device] # calculate the InstFol metrics

The statistical metrics will be saved in results folder in the root dir. And the InstFol metrics will be saved in llm_results folder in the root dir. Additionally, qa folder and evaluation folder will be created in root dir to store the intermediate results.

📄 Citation

If you find this repository helpful, feel free to cite our paper:

@misc{song2025ifir,
      title={IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval}, 
      author={Tingyu Song and Guo Gan and Mingsheng Shang and Yilun Zhao},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2503.04644},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04644}, 
}