Re3: Learning to Balance Relevance & Recency for Temporal Information Retrieval

Abstract

Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) is a critical yet unresolved task for modern search systems, retrieving documents that not only satisfy a query's information need but also adhere to its temporal constraints. This task is shaped by two challenges: Relevance, ensuring alignment with the query's explicit temporal requirements, and Recency, selecting the freshest document among multiple versions. Existing methods often address the two challenges in isolation, relying on brittle heuristics that fail in scenarios where temporal requirements and staleness resistance are intertwined. To address this gap, we introduce Re2Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to disentangle and evaluate Relevance, Recency, and their hybrid combination. Building on this foundation, we propose Re3, a unified and lightweight framework that dynamically balances semantic and temporal information through a query-aware gating mechanism. On Re2Bench, Re3 achieves state-of-the-art results, leading in R@1 across all three subsets. Ablation studies with backbone sensitivity tests confirm robustness, showing strong generalization across diverse encoders and real-world settings. This work provides both a generalizable solution and a principled evaluation suite, advancing the development of temporally aware retrieval systems. Re3 and Re2Bench are available online: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Re3-0C5A