Tutorial on Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning

TL;DR

This tutorial reviews diverse reasoning approaches in information retrieval, providing a unified framework to help IR researchers leverage cross-disciplinary advances for more structured and verifiable inference.

Contribution

It introduces a unified analytical framework for reasoning in IR, mapping recent approaches onto core components to clarify trade-offs and opportunities for integration.

Findings

Mapping approaches reveals their trade-offs and complementarities.

IR can benefit from cross-disciplinary reasoning advances.

Retrieval processes can play a central role in reasoning systems.

Abstract

Information retrieval has long focused on ranking documents by semantic relatedness. Yet many real-world information needs demand more: enforcement of logical constraints, multi-step inference, and synthesis of multiple pieces of evidence. Addressing these requirements is, at its core, a problem of reasoning. Across AI communities, researchers are developing diverse solutions for the problem of reasoning, from inference-time strategies and post-training of LLMs, to neuro-symbolic systems, Bayesian and probabilistic frameworks, geometric representations, and energy-based models. These efforts target the same problem: to move beyond pattern-matching systems toward structured, verifiable inference. However, they remain scattered across disciplines, making it difficult for IR researchers to identify the most relevant ideas and opportunities. To help navigate the fragmented landscape of research in reasoning, this tutorial first articulates a working definition of reasoning within the context of information retrieval and derives from it a unified analytical framework. The framework maps existing approaches along axes that reflect the core components of the definition. By providing a comprehensive overview of recent approaches and mapping current methods onto the defined axes, we expose their trade-offs and complementarities, highlight where IR can benefit from cross-disciplinary advances, and illustrate how retrieval process itself can play a central role in broader reasoning systems. The tutorial will equip participants with both a conceptual framework and practical guidance for enhancing reasoning-capable IR systems, while situating IR as a domain that both benefits and contributes to the broader development of reasoning methodologies.