AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark

Evaluation plays a crucial role in the advancement of information retrieval (IR) models. However, current benchmarks, which are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data, face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains both cost-effectively and efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose the Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (AIR-BENCH). AIR-BENCH is distinguished by three key features: 1) Automated. The testing data in AIR-BENCH is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) without human intervention. 2) Heterogeneous. The testing data in AIR-BENCH is generated with respect to diverse tasks, domains and languages. 3) Dynamic. The domains and languages covered by AIR-BENCH are constantly augmented to provide an increasingly comprehensive evaluation benchmark for community developers. We develop a reliable and robust data generation pipeline to automatically create diverse and high-quality evaluation datasets based on real-world corpora. Our findings demonstrate that the generated testing data in AIR-BENCH aligns well with human-labeled testing data, making AIR-BENCH a dependable benchmark for evaluating IR models. The resources in AIR-BENCH are publicly available at https://github.com/AIR-Bench/AIR-Bench .