arXiv AI

Relevance Is Not Permission: Warranted Attention for Value Contributions

arXiv:2606. 30139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relevance is not permission.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

Dear Algo: A Precision-First Agentic Intent Layer for Unified Search and Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 15877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search and recommendation serve a shared discovery objective but encode intent differently.

By Rui Wang, Jiazhou Wang, Zheng Wei, Chenglin Lu, Fangcheng Sun, Ivy Sun, Jin Sun, Hui Geng, Lillian Zhang, Chao Yang, Lei Chen, Shahin Sefati, Reem Helou, Joe Zhou, Babak Shakibi, Yiyi Pan, Bi Xue, Hong Yan, Shujian Bu
arXiv AI
2d ago

From Association to Causation: Improving Retrieval Precision of Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Causal Relations and an Attention Mechanism

arXiv:2608.21702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM generation on retrieved documents, but the standard terminal retrieval stage--dense-vector similarity,...

By Jing Liu, Yongxing Qi, Muchen Jiang, Chengnan Hu, Qingqing Peng, Haoming Wang, Yuqing Wang, Yang Yu, Xu Zhang, Ting Wu
arXiv AI
3d ago

Clarify-Then-Search: A Clarification Benchmark for Deep Search with End-to-End Nugget Restoration

Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.

By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen
arXiv AI
2d ago

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv AI
Aug 13

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.

By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi