IROH: Insightful Ranking Of Humor using Multi-Stage Hybrid Retrieval with Rationale-Distilled LLM Judges for JOKER 2026 Track Task 1 English
Our team, VANGUARD, presents IROH (Insightful Ranking of Humor), a three-stage retrieval system for JOKER Task 1 English at CLEF 2026, achieving first place on the leaderboard with 0.6347 MAP. Our pipeline combines hybrid sparse-dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and a LoRA-adapted Large Language Model judge ensemble. We employ Gemma 4 to generate query-aware rationales under two prompt strategies, generic and typed, and produce up to four types of structured hard negatives for training data construction. Through an ablation across three cross-encoder architectures, four dense embedders, and eight judge configurations, our key findings are threefold: (1) the rationale-distilled jud...
| Authors | Ana-Maria Luisa Mocanu, Sebastian Mocanu, Ciprian-Octavian Truica et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 14 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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