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
The paper reports on building a retrieval‑augmented legal assistant for Uzbek that operates in both a managed cloud service and an on‑premises deployment. It introduces two new domain benchmarks—one for retrieval and one for end‑to‑end QA—and shows that fine‑tuning an open‑weight text embedder (UTE‑1) can close the performance gap with proprietary models under tight cost and latency constraints. The authors also provide negative results for a QLoRA experiment and release the benchmarks, evaluation code, and the fine‑tuned embedder for future low‑resource legal NLP work.
By Tatul Danielyan, Mariam Avetisyan, Hrant Davtyan
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
The paper introduces a three‑stage training pipeline that builds compact, efficient dense retrievers without requiring ground‑truth relevance labels. Using cross‑lingual alignment, relational knowledge distillation, and contrastive fine‑tuning, the authors develop PolDense (six Polish models ranging from 17 M to 1 B parameters) and EuroDense (a 435 M‑parameter model covering nine European languages). Extensive evaluation on 41 Polish and 150 multilingual tasks shows that PolDense‑1B outperforms larger retrievers up to 9 B parameters, while EuroDense leads in task‑averaged and language‑averaged performance among models below 1 B parameters.
By S{\l}awomir Dadas, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz
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
arXiv:2609.23371v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-context language models interface with external knowledge through raw natural language. In retrieval-augmented systems, this creates a persisten...
By Yifan Wang, Dejing Dou
Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.
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
The paper argues that retrieval‑augmented question‑answering systems should perform semantic compilation at ingest time rather than re‑deriving meaning at query time. By building a maintained structure—incrementally updated embeddings and validated atomic claims—read operations become far cheaper, with experimental results showing higher accuracy and lower token usage compared to traditional chunk‑based retrieval. The authors present two proofs: cheaper incremental updates and superior performance on broadcast‑interview transcripts, suggesting a new systems agenda for compilation and read planning.
By Kyle Wild, Yusuke Takahashi, Asako Uraki
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:2608.22817v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Industrial technical reports contain high-value knowledge for maintenance, troubleshooting, and product engineering, but their heterogeneous structure...
By Parsa Bakhtiari, Hassan Bashiri, Alireza Khalilipour, Masoud Nasiripour, Moharram Challenger
arXiv:2606. 09441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) injects LLM queries with relevant documents to improve response quality.
By Rya Sanovar, Srikant Bharadwaj, Hritvik Taneja, Moinuddin Qureshi