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
arXiv:2610.09724v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Query Expansion (QE) techniques have long been widely used in Information Retrieval (IR) to address the vocabulary mismatch problem. They remain rele...
By Sourav Saha, Aditya Dutta, Soumajit Pramanik, Mandar Mitra
The paper introduces ORDER, a task‑conditioned retrieval‑augmented generation framework that dynamically adapts both indexing and retrieval strategies to each incoming query. It first clusters questions to learn cluster‑specific chunking, metadata filtering, and reranking settings, then routes queries to the appropriate pre‑built index via nearest‑centroid assignment. Additionally, a supervised query router predicts relevant collections and a Uniform Multi‑source Sampler distributes the retrieval budget evenly across selected sources, yielding superior performance on heterogeneous historical archives compared to existing RAG systems.
By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez, Marie Puren
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. 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:2606.16661v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across...
By Nathana\"el Langlois
arXiv:2609.37574v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can...
By Tzu-I Ho, Yung-Yu Shih, Shang-Yu Su, Dongzhe Wang, Yun-Nung Chen
The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.
By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
arXiv:2609.37911v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Scientific queries are often brief, while relevant papers use specialized vocabulary. Generated query expansion can bridge this mismatch, but earlier...
By Ryan C. Barron, Cade W. Trotter, Maksim E. Eren, Kim {\O}. Rasmussen, Liz D. Miller, Benjamin J. Migliori
arXiv:2606. 08090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing.
By Kyoungmin Kim, Martin Catheland, Anastasia Ailamaki
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:2605. 06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented agents are increasingly the interface to large knowledge bases, yet most treat retrieval as a black box: they issue exploratory queries, inspect snippets, and reformulate until evidence emerges.
By Zeyu Yang, Qi Ma, Jason Chen, Anshumali Shrivastava