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

ArXi:2605.06235v1 Announce Type: cross Retrieval benchmarks are increasingly saturating, but we argue that efficient search is far from a solved problem. We identify a class of queries we call oblique, which seek documents that instantiate a latent pattern, like finding all tweets that express an implicit stance, chat logs that nstrate a particular failure mode, or transcripts that match an abstract scenario. We study three mechanisms through which obliqueness may arise and