Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.04904

ModelLakeFishing: Efficient Retrieval over Million-Scale Model Lakes

Abstract

Open model lakes may contain millions of reusable models, making it costly to identify suitable models for a new dataset. We present ModelLakeFishing, a model-retrieval framework for queries specifying a target dataset, prediction task, and evaluation metric. It consolidates metadata and historical evaluations into a model-dataset-task evidence graph, learns model and query embeddings with a relation-aware graph encoder, and indexes model embeddings using Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) search. At query time, HNSW retrieves 1,000 candidates without scoring every model, after which a training-side task prior reranks candidates for the requested metric and returns the top 10. We evaluate on a lake of 3,016,439 models and 247,803 observed model-dataset performance pairs using three root-aware splits that hold test performance edges out of representation learning and retrieval. ModelLakeFishing achieves a mean eligible-query gold@10 of 0.2968, recovering the observed-best model in the top 10 for 29.68% of eligible queries and retaining 93.47% of the gold@10 of an exhaustive baseline using the same scoring and reranking procedure. Given precomputed query embeddings, retrieval and reranking take 0.747 ms median and 1.102 ms at the 95th percentile. These results demonstrate efficient retrieval over million-model lakes from sparse relational evidence.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Xiaoyang Liu, Zhengyuan Dong, Renée J. Miller. 2026-10-04. ModelLakeFishing: Efficient Retrieval over Million-Scale Model Lakes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04904

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Advertising to Agents: Measuring Description-Framing Bias in LLM Tool Selection

AI agents often pick tools from registries, where each provider writes its tool's description; we ask whether sales language there changes which tool an agent picks. We built pairs of listings that differ in one way (praise, a verifiable specification, or list order) and asked two OpenAI models to call one tool. In a preregistered study, stacked praise (four kinds) raised a tool's pick rate by about 43 percentage points, matching or beating a verifiable specification. Praise also pulled some picks toward tools whose numeric limit was too small. With identical listings, the first-listed tool was picked about 72 points more often. Structured fields helped agents pick the capable tool; sales text beside them reduced or erased that gain. An exploratory study of five models shows the same direction; a "Sponsored" label dampened it, and a system-prompt warning moved one model. Registries could list limits as fields, hide sales text from agents, and randomize order. Stacked praise replicated on held-out domains; no single kind did after correcting for multiple tests. Preregistered results are provisional until blind phrase ratings are complete, and cover two small models.

cs.IR↗

Reasoning Reranking with Semantic IDs as the Sole Item Representation

Reasoning rerankers write a rationale before ranking a candidate slate, and existing systems read item metadata to do so, even though generative recommenders increasingly represent items as compact Semantic IDs (SIDs). Ranking from SIDs alone has two appeals: SID prompts are far shorter than the matched item text, and although item codes are fixed from content, the backbone learns their token embeddings in part from user-item interaction sequences, so the tokens can carry behavioral signal that item text lacks. That training targets next-item generation, and whether it supports ranking a supplied slate from SIDs alone is untested. We build ReRankID, a controlled testbed in which models reason and rank from a history and slate shown only as SIDs, varying item rendering, history length, and slate size one at a time. On this testbed, such models often copy the input order instead of reranking, and readable metadata does not repair the failure. We compare supervised fine-tuning, rejection-sampled self-training, on-policy distillation, and verifier-based reinforcement learning as post-training methods and find that they elicit the missing behavior. The strongest post-trained model, the 8B model trained with a graded ranking reward, gives the best SID-only ranking and matches strong text-reading LLMs whose prompts are about 20x longer. It ranks above random with no history at all, where a caption-reading reference does not, and it keeps its gains at long histories, where text prompts pass 50k tokens and the caption-reading reference stops improving. In a paired rationale audit, this model argues trade-offs better than that reference but describes items less accurately. The common post-training methods we test thus elicit ranking from SIDs but not faithful item descriptions, which calls for post-training that improves the reasoning itself, not only the ranking it produces.

cs.IR↗

How Do LLM-Generated Texts Impact Term-Based Retrieval Models?

As more content generated by large language models (LLMs) floods into the Internet, information retrieval (IR) systems now face the challenge of distinguishing and handling a blend of human-authored and machine-generated texts. Recent studies suggest that neural retrievers may exhibit a preferential inclination toward LLM-generated content, while classic term-based retrievers like BM25 tend to favor human-written documents. This paper investigates the influence of LLM-generated content on term-based retrieval models, which are valued for their efficiency and robust generalization across domains. Our linguistic analysis reveals that LLM-generated texts exhibit smoother high-frequency and steeper low-frequency Zipf slopes, higher term specificity, and greater document-level diversity. These traits are aligned with LLMs being trained to optimize reader experience through diverse and precise expressions. Our study further explores whether term-based retrieval models demonstrate source bias, concluding that these models prioritize documents whose term distributions closely correspond to those of the queries, rather than displaying an inherent source bias. This work provides a foundation for understanding and addressing potential biases in term-based IR systems managing mixed-source content.

cs.IR↗