Morteza Zihayat

Information Retrieval systems can amplify societal inequalities when training data and ranking algorithms encode biases toward certain gender identities. Query reformulation methods are known to improve retrieval effectiveness, yet they seldom treat retrieval fairness as a first-class criterion....

Modern information retrieval pipelines combine retrieval, LLM-based generation, and LLM-based judgment, and a poor outcome may originate in any of the three stages. Existing work studies these failures in isolation. This paper instead asks whether query difficulty itself transfers across the thre...