The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv:2605.05726v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As LLM agents are increasingly deployed with large libraries of reusable skills, selecting the right skill for a user request has become a critical...
By Hongcheol Cho, Ryangkyung Kang, Youngeun Kim
arXiv:2606. 02737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrieval models exhibit positional bias: retrieval effectiveness degrades when relevant information appears later in a passage (Zeng et al.
By Andrianos Michail, Elias Schuhmacher, Juri Opitz, Simon Clematide, Rico Sennrich
arXiv:2608. 09168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge.
By Liang He, Jingbo Wen, Hongyu Gu, Hao Li, Haoyu Wang, Yixiong Chen, Kangning Cui, Xilu Wang
arXiv:2606.02737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Dense retrieval compresses a passage into a single vector, but this compression is positionally skewed: early content dominates the embedding...
By Andrianos Michail, Elias Schuhmacher, Juri Opitz, Simon Clematide, Rico Sennrich
arXiv:2604. 00715v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves language model (LM) performance by providing relevant context at test time for knowledge-intensive situations.
By Karan Singh, Michael Yu, Varun Gangal, Zhuofu Tao, Sachin Kumar, Emmy Liu, Steven Y. Feng
The paper introduces LRE (Learned Relevance Eviction), a lightweight, CPU‑only, language‑model‑free scorer that learns which parts of an agent’s interaction history are task‑critical and preserves them verbatim. In experiments, LRE matches or surpasses baseline eviction policies on accuracy‑cost trade‑offs, recovers 93% of full‑history accuracy, reduces worst‑case prompt size by 52%, and outperforms dense and token‑pruning encoders in conversational memory while being 295–1569× smaller. The method also achieves superior budgeted answer quality on LoCoMo reading and can be trained annotation‑free, recovering 95% of supervised scorer performance.
By Nusrat Jahan Lia, Aritra Mazumder
arXiv:2606. 30473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study retrieval over catalogs of structured metadata, where each record is a small schema whose fields answer different kinds of query.
By Aivin V. Solatorio, Olivier Dupriez, Rafael Macalaba
arXiv:2606. 18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders.
By Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Jonah Turner, Heuiseok Lim
Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge. Although recent work has substantially improved skill retrieval due to the increasing skill libraries, retrieving a plausible skill bundle does not guarantee that executing it is worthwhile.
arXiv:2609.13486v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent work has shown that fine-tuning decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for retrieval yields strong first-stage retrievers, with effectivene...
By Anubhav Shrestha, Safal Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Torsten Suel, Keith Ross
SkillFlow is an open, multi-stage retrieval system that helps AI agents selectively load relevant skills from a large library of community-contributed SKILL.md definitions. The pipeline uses dense retrieval, two rounds of cross-encoder reranking, and LLM-based selection to balance recall and precision. Evaluations on SkillsBench and Terminal-Bench show that SkillFlow improves performance when high-quality skills are available, but retrieval alone does not help if the corpus lacks executable skills for the target domain.
By Fangzhou Li, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Ilias Tagkopoulos