arXiv AI

TRACE: Accountable Agentic Retrieval for Source Discovery in Digital Archives

TRACE is a training‑free, agentic retrieval framework that enables accountable source discovery in historical archives, addressing challenges such as OCR degradation and genre heterogeneity. Developed for the DECIDON project on French Third Republic political discourse, it is deployed internally for 24 researchers across six institutions. On the HistoriQA‑ThirdRepublic benchmark, TRACE achieves R@10 of 0.856 and MRR of 0.653, outperforming sparse, dense, graph‑based, and other agentic RAG baselines, especially on multi‑hop and cross‑corpus questions, while costing only about $0.02 per question.

arXiv AI
Jul 1

HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: Multi-Hop Question Answering Corpus for Historical Research, Parliamentary Debates from the French Third Republic (1870-1940)

arXiv:2606. 31325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: a French-language dataset of multi-hop historical questions derived from parliamentary debates and newspapers of the French Third Republic.

By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez (EPITA, LRE), Marie Puren (LRE, CJM)
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

INDRA: A New AI Tool for Exploring Tobacco, Fossil Fuel, and Chemical Industry Archives

INDRA is a research platform that integrates multiple archival collections—such as UCSF’s Industry Documents Library, Columbia and CUNY’s ToxicDocs, and Stanford’s SRITA—into a single, LLM‑readable corpus. It employs three safeguards: a closed evidentiary sandbox, real‑time provenance tagging, and a deterministic system‑level protocol to ensure that model outputs are clearly distinguished from archival evidence and from the model’s own inferences. The platform enables large‑language‑model‑powered investigations across these archives while keeping the conditions of knowledge production transparent and auditable.

By Daniel Akselrad, Robert N. Proctor
arXiv AI
Jul 28

VecTree-RAG: An Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Combining Vector and Tree Retrieval for Efficiency and Accuracy

arXiv:2607. 23006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific question answering requires a retrieval system to solve two distinct problems: identifying which papers are relevant and locating the supporting evidence within those papers.

By Xinyan Zhong, Yuwei Shi, Yuqi Wei, Chen Shen, Tianhang Zhou, Zhenghao Wu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Evidence Blindness in Direct Corpus Interaction: Persistent Navigation with AtlasNav

The paper introduces AtlasNav, a persistent multi‑view corpus‑navigation framework that organizes a corpus into a Corpus Atlas, enabling large‑language‑model agents to navigate efficiently under finite interaction budgets. AtlasNav reduces online inference cost by 30.21% and achieves 92.05% strict accuracy on BrowseComp‑Plus, while earlier and more rapidly realizing required evidence compared to dynamic‑workspace methods. The approach also transfers well to other corpora such as PhantomWiki and heterogeneous enterprise knowledge bases, demonstrating that effective agentic search relies on both accessible evidence and a reusable corpus representation.

By Hongyu Guo, Zhiyu Zheng, Zhao Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Agent Zero Memory: Provenance-Aware Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents

Agent Zero Memory is a provenance‑aware long‑term memory system for large language model agents that distills user interactions into three parallel memory structures: an episodic timeline, an associative entity‑event knowledge graph, and a semantic, citation‑locked hierarchical documentary memory. Retrieval is performed via an intent gate, source router, and concurrent searches across the three systems, producing integrated, cited answers that exclude fabrication and require evidence the reader has opened. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LongMemEval (95.60%) and LoCoMo (93.60%) while offering a favorable accuracy‑cost‑latency trade‑off across multiple backbone LLMs.

By Ming Wu, Pengyuan Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 16

ORDER: Task-Conditioned Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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