arXiv Computation and Language

Retrieve, Match, Escalate: Accurate and Scalable Product Linking with VLM-Distilled Cross-Encoders and Agentic VLMs

The paper introduces a scalable product‑linking system that uses a retrieve‑then‑match cascade. First, a lightweight text cross‑encoder auto‑resolves the majority of merchant‑catalog product pairs with high precision, while an agentic multimodal vision‑language model handles the remaining ambiguous cases by inspecting images and performing web searches. This approach balances computational cost and accuracy, improving overall link coverage from 68% to 77% without requiring fine‑tuning of the agent.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Iris: Climbing to the Search Frontier

The paper introduces Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two search agents trained at 35B and 397B parameter scales. They use a novel data pipeline that constructs reverse‑engineered multi‑hop queries from web hyperlinks, filters trajectories, and alternates supervised fine‑tuning with reinforcement learning in a process called SFT‑RL climbing. Evaluations on several benchmarks show that, with inference‑time context management, the agents achieve the best open‑source results in their parameter ranges.

By Ziyuan Liu, Hengqi Liu, Zichuan Wang, Yang Qin, Jiachen Liang, Xu Chu, Shaowei Chen, Yuantao Gu, Mu Chuan
arXiv AI
Sep 3

When Agents Implement Systems: A Case Study in Defects, Detection, and Evaluation Rigor

The paper reports a case study of a large language model (LLM) coding agent tasked with building a multi‑component data system from a detailed specification. During a single session the agent introduced five defects, which were categorized by violated constraints and detection methods. The study also evaluates the agent’s retrieval‑filtering strategy on the HotpotQA benchmark, showing that filtering to a graph‑identified entity set yields higher recall than unfiltered search, with a statistically significant gap across all tested budgets.

By Phanindra Reddy Madduru
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Diagnosing and Mitigating Retrieval Bottlenecks in LLM-Based Cold-Start Recommendation

arXiv:2606. 29947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in recommender systems, with the expectation that semantic understanding will help in cold-start and long-tail regimes.

By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher), Yicheng Wang (Independent Researcher)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Serving the Long Tail: Training-Free LLM Candidate Generation for Vacation Rental Marketplaces

arXiv:2607. 09877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vacation rental marketplaces face a structural imbalance on the supply side: a small fraction of properties receive most user interactions, while the long tail of new, niche, and seasonal listings generates too little behavioral signal for collaborative filtering to serve effectively.

By Syed Mohammed Arshad Zaidi, Eric Rincon, Shayan Hassantabar
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Efficient GPU Retrieval for Semantic Search

The paper introduces a GPU‑optimized retrieval framework for LinkedIn’s semantic search, partitioning embeddings into eight category‑supervised segments and applying a min/median aggregation rule aligned with the existing relevance policy. A lightweight Stage‑1 scorer generates high‑recall candidates, while a two‑stage GPU architecture—FP8 coarse ranking followed by FP16 re‑ranking—boosts throughput and recall, achieving 99.6‑99.8% of full‑FP16 recall at over 500 QPS per shard. In A/B testing, the system raises exploratory‑query Precision@10 from 63.7% to 79.0% and navigational Precision@1 from 65.5% to 74.7%, with human evaluation confirming the improvement.

By Dhritiman Das, Chujie Zheng, Ronak Kaoshik, Pratik Dixit, Vishal Shah, Yanbo Li, Jiahao Xu, Manika Agarwal, Chinmay Naik, Lingyu Zhang, Chetan Bhole, Chirag Bhanuprasad Mehta, Meng Zheng, Puneet Singh Ahluwalia, Shirisha Singh, Ping Jin, Manas Apte, Gokulraj Mohanasundaram, Tugrul Bingol, Raghavan Muthuregunathan, Fedor Borisyuk
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Semantic Retrieval for Product Search in E-Commerce

arXiv:2606. 01504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic retrieval in e-commerce must handle short, noisy, and colloquial queries over large product catalogs with fine-grained attribute distinctions.

By Nikhil Kothari, Saksham Samdani, Ritam Mallick, Praveen Gupta, Ankit Vijay, Surender Kumar