LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by generating document-like passages. In hybrid retrieval, however, most evaluations fuse fixed top-$L$ dense and sparse rankings. Because the cutoff contr...
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.
arXiv:2606. 28367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is routinely extended with methods meant to improve retrieval: query expansion, hierarchical and cross-document summarization, graph-based expansion, per-query routing, rank fusion, and corrective re-retrieval.
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...
arXiv:2608. 03860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19.
CAGE: Coherence-Aware Graph Encoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation introduces a reranking framework that evaluates and enhances the coherence of retrieved passages across four dimensions—Intra-Domain Relevance, Noise Resistance, Informational Bonding, and Factual Consistency. The method transforms passages into directed heterogeneous entity graphs, reweights factual anchors, encodes structural patterns with a Relational Graph Convolutional Network, and fuses inter-chunk coherence with query relevance to produce a final ranking. Evaluations on four multi‑hop benchmarks show that CAGE matches or surpasses strong baselines, improving Recall@5 on bridge‑dominated datasets and consistently boosting downstream Exact Match scores, indicating that structurally coherent context leads to more precise answers even when retrieval recall is similar or lower.
The paper introduces REVA, a method for compressing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) prompts by aggregating historical query–document–model interactions into reusable evidence views. REVA mines attention traces from the target generator, maps token-level attention to readable words, aggregates importance across repeated document accesses, and produces budget‑specific plain‑text views that maintain document order and the standard RAG interface. Experiments on four benchmarks with modern LLMs show that REVA improves generation quality by 1.0–5.8 points over existing compressors while reducing compression overhead by 5.3 to 15.6 times and adding less than 40 ms of latency.
The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.
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.
arXiv:2607. 26071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we propose GuidedRAG, a novel extension to traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that introduces a dedicated selection stage and semantic steering during retrieval.
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).
As retrieval systems scale, high-quality reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing rerankers, whether encoder-based or decoder-based, jointly encode the query and passage, tightly coupling their computation and limiting deployment efficiency as well as flexibility.