When Should Queries Be Decomposed? A Stage-Aware Study of Query Decomposition for Multi-Condition Retrieval

[2606.08577] When Should Queries Be Decomposed? A Stage-Aware Study of Query Decomposition for Multi-Condition Retrieval Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Computer Science > Information Retrieval arXiv:2606.08577 (cs) [Submitted on 7 Jun 2026 ( v1 ), last revised 27 Aug 2026 (this version, v2)] Title: When Should Queries Be Decomposed? A Stage-Aware Study of Query Decomposition for Multi-Condition Retrieval Authors: Bochao Yin , Xuan Lu , Zhengyu Qi , Xiaoyu Shen View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Multi-condition retrieval requires systems to identify documents that satisfy multiple distinct constraints, moving beyond mere topical relevance. While query decomposition is widely adopted as an intuitive remedy, its effectiveness across different retrieval pipeline stages remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a stage-aware empirical study and uncover a stark, stage-dependent effect: decomposition during initial retrieval frequently harms retrieval performance due to semantic dilution, yet substantially improves reranking by enabling more fine-grained constraint verification. Motivated by these insights, we propose a principled Stage-Aware Decomposition framework that retains the monolithic query during initial retrieval to preserve global semantic context, while employing sub-queries exclusively during reranking for fine-grained constraint matching. Extensive evaluations on the MultiConIR and SSRB benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently improves ranking performance for compositional queries across multiple retrieval and reranking models. We release our code at this https URL . Comments: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026 Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.08577 [cs.IR] (or arXiv:2606.08577v2 [cs.IR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08577 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Bochao Yin [ view email ] [v1] Sun, 7 Jun 2026 11:13:15 UTC (908 KB) [v2] Thu, 27 Aug 2026 03:14:11 UTC (909 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Additional Features Audio Summary Current browse context: cs.IR < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations SciX Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab)

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