CFDA & CLIP at TREC iKAT 2025: Enhancing Personalized Conversational Search via Query Reformulation and Rank Fusion

Abstract: The 2025 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) featured both interactive and offline submission tasks. The former requires systems to operate under real-time constraints, making robustness and efficiency as important as accuracy, while the latter enables controlled evaluation of passage ranking and response generation with pre-defined datasets. To address this, we explored query rewriting and retrieval fusion as core strategies. We built our pipelines around Best-of-$N$ selection and Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) strategies to handle different submission tasks. Results show that reranking and fusion improve robustness while revealing trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency across both tasks.