The paper introduces STAIR, a retrieval system that uses a document’s Table of Contents to guide large language models in accessing global structure, thereby reducing hallucinations in Retrieval Augmented Generation. Experiments with a fine‑tuned Differentiable Search Index show that ToC‑based retrieval yields a low hallucination rate (<0.05%) and improves Recall@1 to 82.6% on the newly released SearchTome benchmark, outperforming baselines like BM25, DPR, and Mistral. The authors also release SearchTome, a diverse dataset of 18 books across six domains, to encourage further research in ToC‑based retrieval.
By Vineet Kumar, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, vishwajeet kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Sachindra Joshi
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:2606. 10621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern retrieval increasingly relies on dense and learned-sparse neural models that are effective but require encoding the entire corpus into a specialized index, rebuilt whenever the model changes.
By Arthur Satouf, Giulio D'Erasmo, Yuxuan Zong, Habiboulaye Amadou Boubacar, Pablo Piantanida, Benjamin Piwowarski
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
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 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.
By Fina Polat, Daniel Daza, Pengyu Zhang, Klim Zaporojets, Paul Groth
arXiv:2507. 10540v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created a diverse landscape of models, each excelling at different tasks.
By Tao Feng, Haozhen Zhang, Zijie Lei, Pengrui Han, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Jiaxuan You
arXiv:2606. 04194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieving the few past turns that answer a new query across long multi-session histories is the retrieval bottleneck behind long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval).
By Christian Lysenst{\o}en
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.
By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher), Yicheng Wang (Independent Researcher)
arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...
By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
The paper introduces DRAG, a query‑adaptive framework that jointly selects retriever and generator configurations for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Two variants are presented: DRAG_QPP, a training‑free routing method using Query Performance Prediction and perplexity signals, and DRAG_SFT, a supervised approach that fine‑tunes an LLM to predict configurations. Experiments on three LLM families and four QA benchmarks show that DRAG_QPP matches strong static baselines while cutting inference latency, and DRAG_SFT consistently outperforms both static and training‑free adaptive baselines, demonstrating a better effectiveness‑efficiency trade‑off.
By Neeraj Anand, Payel Santra, Partha Basuchowdhuri, Debasis Ganguly, Sumit Bhatia
AdaFuse is an adaptive ensemble decoding framework for large language models that dynamically selects fusion units during generation. It uses an uncertainty-based criterion to decide when to ensemble, applying a diversity-aware scaling strategy in uncertain states while continuing direct generation when confident. Experiments on question answering, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation show AdaFuse outperforms strong baselines with an average relative improvement of 6.88%.
By Chengming Cui, Tianxin Wei, Ziyi Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Zhichen Zeng, Zhining Liu, Xuying Ning, Duo Zhou, Jingrui He