Foundations of GenIR
This work addresses the problem of enhancing information access for users by leveraging generative AI, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models and paradigms.
The chapter explores how generative AI models can transform information access systems by enabling information generation and synthesis, which produce tailored content and integrate existing knowledge to improve user experience and reduce hallucinations.
The chapter discusses the foundational impact of modern generative AI models on information access (IA) systems. In contrast to traditional AI, the large-scale training and superior data modeling of generative AI models enable them to produce high-quality, human-like responses, which brings brand new opportunities for the development of IA paradigms. In this chapter, we identify and introduce two of them in details, i.e., information generation and information synthesis. Information generation allows AI to create tailored content addressing user needs directly, enhancing user experience with immediate, relevant outputs. Information synthesis leverages the ability of generative AI to integrate and reorganize existing information, providing grounded responses and mitigating issues like model hallucination, which is particularly valuable in scenarios requiring precision and external knowledge. This chapter delves into the foundational aspects of generative models, including architecture, scaling, and training, and discusses their applications in multi-modal scenarios. Additionally, it examines the retrieval-augmented generation paradigm and other methods for corpus modeling and understanding, demonstrating how generative AI can enhance information access systems. It also summarizes potential challenges and fruitful directions for future studies.