The "Curse of Knowledge" in LLM Query Simulation: Concept Provenance for Tracing Answer-Side Intrusion
LLM-generated search queries are widely used to augment IR evaluation, yet they may contain concepts that presuppose answer-side document knowledge, violating the information-access boundary of pre-search users. Existing validation metrics, including overlap, diversity, and effectiveness, cannot distinguish rare human-tail variation from candidate answer-side intrusion. We introduce concept provenance, a framework that assigns query concepts to backstory-supported, human-central, human-tail, and candidate answer-side zones, operationalizing a boundary that retrieval metrics alone cannot detect. Applying concept provenance to 77,004 queries across 100 UQV100 topics, 8 LLMs, and 5 prompt co...
| Authors | Chenglong Ma, Xinye Wanyan, Danula Hettiachchi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 26 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 September 2026 |
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