arXiv AI

Relevance Is Not Permission: Warranted Attention for Value Contributions

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

arXiv AI
Sep 12

Relevance Is Not Permission: Localizing and Controlling Metric-Facing Attention Contributions

The paper introduces Warrant, a method that locates and controls the contributions of attention mechanisms to model metrics. Warrant exposes the item‑wise contribution path to the reported metric and applies query‑conditioned permission on that path. Experiments on multiple datasets show that Warrant improves primary metrics in most comparisons, reveals a weak correlation between attention and prediction utility, and demonstrates that learned permission can recover evidence ranking while suppressing distractors.

By Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Warranted Attention: Learning What to Pass from Attention to Prediction

The paper introduces Warrant, a method that learns to gate attention-derived item contributions before they are aggregated for prediction. Unlike traditional attention, which assumes relevance guarantees usefulness, Warrant applies learned, item‑wise permissions to control both the relative allocation and total transmission mass. Experiments on CyGNet and HotpotQA datasets show that ungated attention paths degrade performance, while Warrant’s selective gating recovers or improves metrics such as MRR and reduces unsupported selections.

By Minwoo Yu, Young-guk Ha
arXiv AI
Sep 3

CaST-POI: Candidate-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Modeling for Next POI Recommendation

CaST-POI is a next‑point‑of‑interest recommender that conditions the user representation on each candidate location by adding bucketised biases for visit recency and geographic distance to the candidate. Unlike prior models that treat all candidates uniformly, CaST-POI lets each candidate read the trajectory with different attention weights grounded in real distance. Experiments on NYC, TKY, and CA datasets show significant MRR gains over seven baselines, with ablation revealing the importance of the revisit gate and spatial bias.

By Zhenyu Yu, Chunlei Meng, Yangchen Zeng, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou
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
Aug 25

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
Aug 24

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
Sep 25

From Interests to Semantic IDs: Retrieval-Grounded Credit Assignment for Generative Recommendation

The paper proposes a retrieval‑grounded credit‑assignment method for generative recommenders that use Semantic IDs (SIDs). By structuring each generated trace into a history summary, a set of interest hypotheses, and a final SID, and then verifying each hypothesis with a frozen retriever, the method assigns reward at the hypothesis level rather than only at the final SID. Experiments on Amazon Reviews datasets show consistent improvements in SID recommendation, and an oracle analysis on Video Games data demonstrates that selecting target‑relevant queries among generated interests boosts recall and ranking.

By Mengdan Zhu, Yufan Zhao, Yao Zhao, Sophie Di, Tao Di, Yulan Yan, Sridhar Iyer, Liang Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ABAI at COLIEE 2026 Task 1: Multi-Stage Retrieval with GraphRAG-Enhanced Meta-Learning, and a Post-Hoc Study of the Cross-Validation-to-Test Gap

The paper reports the ABAI submission to COLIEE 2026 Task 1, a case law retrieval challenge that suppresses cited passages, and details a four‑stage retrieval pipeline: multi‑view BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, neural reranking, graph‑based features via a graph attention network, and a LightGBM meta‑learner over 34 features. The best run achieved an F1 score of 0.177 on the official test set, compared to a cross‑validated 0.311, and the authors attribute the gap to a recall ceiling, temporal distribution shift, and threshold miscalibration. A controlled post‑hoc study examined the impact of threshold transfer, decision quality across time, and query similarity, and identified specific remedies—such as BM25 length‑normalisation tuning, event‑triple views, and dense fusion—that improved recall, while other interventions had no effect.

By Minhan Cho, Soyoung Park, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han