🤖 AI Summary
论文提出IROH系统，通过混合稀疏密集检索、交叉编码重排序和LoRA适应的大语言模型法官集合解决幽默排名问题。
📝 Abstract
Our team, VANGUARD, presents IROH (Insightful Ranking of Humor), a three-stage retrieval system for JOKER Task 1 English at CLEF 2026, achieving first place on the leaderboard with 0.6347 MAP. Our pipeline combines hybrid sparse-dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and a LoRA-adapted Large Language Model judge ensemble. We employ Gemma 4 to generate query-aware rationales under two prompt strategies, generic and typed, and produce up to four types of structured hard negatives for training data construction. Through an ablation across three cross-encoder architectures, four dense embedders, and eight judge configurations, our key findings are threefold: (1) the rationale-distilled judge is the primary driver of ranking quality, whereas appending rationales to the first-stage index contributes negligibly; (2) structured hard negatives degrade generalisation in nearly all configurations despite inflating local validation scores; and (3) across the components we ablate, the lighter, better-calibrated model is competitive with or stronger than its larger counterpart, with the generic-rationale Qwen2.5-7B judge (0.6055 MAP) outperforming every Gemma-4-31B configuration, and the advantage of generic over typed rationales is concentrated almost entirely in the smaller model.