arXiv:2607. 24781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RAG systems rely on chunking, which destroys structural information in documents.
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.
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.
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 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.
CoHyDE is an iterative co‑training framework that jointly trains a dense encoder and an LLM rewriter for tool retrieval from large API catalogs. The encoder is fine‑tuned with InfoNCE on catalog‑style hypothetical descriptions generated by the rewriter, while the rewriter is preference‑aligned via DPO against the encoder’s retrieval scores. On a 10k‑tool subset of ToolBench, three rounds of CoHyDE outperform the best single‑component baseline by 2.5 pp NDCG@5 on standard queries and 6.3 pp on vague queries, with the largest gains on the hardest vague tier.
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. 16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Static pruning is widely used to accelerate sparse neural retrieval, yet existing studies each validate their conclusions within a single custom pipeline, leaving it unclear which findings transfer to modern engines with different index organizations and dynamic pruning mechanisms.
Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Knowledge Graph Expansion, RRF Fusion, and Per-Chunk Grounded Evaluation for Enterprise Document Search describes DocuSearch, an offline multi‑agent system designed for telecom network operations. The system combines semantic vector search, BM25 full‑text search, and knowledge‑graph neighbor expansion, merges the results via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and reranks with a cross‑encoder before pruning with Maximal Marginal Relevance. A per‑chunk evaluation loop ensures only grounded answers are returned, achieving Precision@10 of 0.69, Recall@10 of 0.79, and an 89.6% grounding rate—improvements of 15, 16, and 18.4 percentage points over a dense‑only baseline.
arXiv:2608. 16621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time.
The study evaluates six retrieval methods for ranking computer science faculty as potential academic advisors based on graduate applicants’ research interest statements. Using a new dataset of 768 faculty profiles from nine U.S. universities and 162 graded relevance judgments across five queries, the reranked hybrid approach achieved the highest mean NDCG@10 (0.477). Ablation experiments showed that faculty biographies alone outperform the full model, and adding arXiv abstracts actually decreased performance, leading to a late‑fusion design. All code, data, and labels are publicly released.
arXiv:2608.21610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation relies mostly on flat, fixed-granularity indexes: documents are cut into uniform chunks and retrieved by similarity, dis...