Are LLM-Based Retrievers Worth Their Cost? An Empirical Study of Efficiency, Robustness, and Reasoning Overhead.

@inproceedings{abdallah-2026-llmbased, author = {Abdelrahman Abdallah and Jamie Holdcroft and Mohammed Ali and Adam Jatowt}, editor = {Hannah Bast and Alistair Moffat and Falk Scholer and Marc Najork and Min Zhang and Hannah Bast and Marc Najork and Min Zhang}, title = {{Are LLM-Based Retrievers Worth Their Cost? An Empirical Study of Efficiency, Robustness, and Reasoning Overhead}}, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2026, MelbourneVICAustralia, July 20-24, 2026}}, pages = {2790--2800}, publisher = {ACM}, year = {2026}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3808566}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3808566} }