arXiv:2603. 17205v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Domain-specific finetuning is essential for dense retrievers, yet not all data pairs contribute equally to the learning process.
arXiv:2608. 16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Static pruning is widely used to accelerate sparse neural retrieval, yet existing studies each validate their conclusions within a single custom pipeline, leaving it unclear which findings transfer to modern engines with different index organizations and dynamic pruning mechanisms.
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.
The paper introduces Efficient Retrieval Adapter (ERA), a query‑side adapter framework that enables dense retrieval systems to adapt to asymmetric query–document scenarios without re‑indexing. ERA first aligns the embedding spaces of a powerful query embedder and a lightweight document embedder using unlabeled documents, then fine‑tunes the aligned query representation with a small set of labeled query‑document pairs. In experiments on 126 MAIR retrieval tasks across six domains, ERA boosts average nDCG@10 by up to 8.2 points in symmetric settings and over 12 points in asymmetric settings while requiring far fewer labels than fully supervised adapter training.
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.
The paper introduces “PACE”, a training‑free framework that tackles bottlenecks in Retrieval‑Augmented Generation by frontloading evidence and adaptively budgeting reranking. It first reorders candidate documents based on marginal evidence coverage—prioritizing query‑relevant, complementary, and chain‑forming documents—providing a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee. Then it dynamically adjusts the reranking budget according to the relative pressure of the reranker and the language model, improving evidence recall and reducing p95 latency in multi‑hop QA workloads.
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...
arXiv:2609.22100v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves language models with retrieved evidence, but processing many long passages is costly and can introduce...
arXiv:2601.13111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes...
The paper investigates modular entity disambiguation by separating candidate retrieval from entity selection. It compares sparse retrieval (BM25), Web KB search, and a dense retriever, all paired with large language model selectors. Results show that a training‑free BM25 retriever combined with an LLM selector achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the ZELDA benchmark, and the modular approach enables abstention when retrieval fails.
arXiv:2606. 01070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrievers excel at first-stage candidate generation but lack effective reranking in zero-resource settings.
arXiv:2601.20107v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (e.g., ColPali) enable fine-grained Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) but incur prohibitive multi-vector index st...
arXiv:2608.15851v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on retrieval modules to ground large language model (LLM) outputs. LLM-based query expansio...