ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process

Effective query expansion for web search benefits from promoting both exploration and result diversity to capture multiple interpretations and facets of a query. While recent LLM-based methods have improved retrieval performance and demonstrate strong domain generalization without additional training, they often generate narrowly focused expansions that overlook these desiderata. We propose ThinkQE, a test-time query expansion framework addressing this limitation through two key components: a thinking-based expansion process that encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration, and a corpus-interaction strategy that iteratively refines expansions using retrieval feedback from the corpus. Experiments on diverse web search benchmarks (DL19, DL20, and BRIGHT) show ThinkQE consistently outperforms prior approaches, including training-intensive dense retrievers and rerankers.

@article{lei2025_2506.09260,
  title={ ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process },
  author={ Yibin Lei and Tao Shen and Andrew Yates },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09260},
  year={ 2025 }
}