Pith Number

pith:3WHC7VFZ

pith:2026:3WHC7VFZWTOWVQI3OUPE56XTA6

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

OBLIQ-Bench: Exposing Overlooked Bottlenecks in Modern Retrievers with Latent and Implicit Queries

Devavrat Shah, Diane Tchuindjo, Omar Khattab

Modern retrievers fail to surface most documents matching latent patterns even when reasoning LLMs can verify them once found.

arxiv:2605.06235 v2 · 2026-05-07 · cs.IR · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{3WHC7VFZWTOWVQI3OUPE56XTA6}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

reasoning LLMs reliably recognize latent relevance whenever relevant documents are surfaced, but even sophisticated retrieval pipelines fail to surface most relevant documents in the first place.

C2weakest assumption

That the three mechanisms of obliqueness and the five problems in OBLIQ-Bench are representative of important real-world retrieval challenges and that the observed asymmetry is not an artifact of the specific corpora or models chosen.

C3one line summary

OBLIQ-Bench reveals that modern retrievers fail to surface documents for latent and implicit queries even though LLMs reliably recognize relevance when those documents are provided.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-01T01:02:41.817512Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

dd8e2fd4b9b4dd6ac11b751e4efaf307a7060a85b846ee5b4fa152ea53fd992f

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.06235 · arxiv_version: 2605.06235v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.06235 · pith_short_12: 3WHC7VFZWTOW · pith_short_16: 3WHC7VFZWTOWVQI3 · pith_short_8: 3WHC7VFZ

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/3WHC7VFZWTOWVQI3OUPE56XTA6 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: dd8e2fd4b9b4dd6ac11b751e4efaf307a7060a85b846ee5b4fa152ea53fd992f

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "038678222ea7982c210b79c550955a4f4de4ee6b45829cd165f5fba945a0a5ea",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.IR",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-07T13:22:49Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "70febc12967e24495eec2cf4815ece2e70e3dbd488185165e6dcd6f7442c60e4"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.06235",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}