The paper explores how individual text corpora (ITCs) can be integrated into small language models (SLMs) using DoRA fine‑tuning. By training a DoRA adapter for each of 150 participants, the authors show that the adapter can encode a participant’s own ITC into the model’s weights, improving fit to that participant’s held‑out text. However, while the adapter improves log‑loss on a generalized knowledge test, it does not enhance accuracy under a bias‑corrected PMI readout, and adding retrieval does not provide further benefit.
arXiv:2509. 16780v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show promise as educational aids but often lack alignment with specific course materials.
arXiv:2608.22767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term language-model agents accumulate memories across interactions, but their retrievers typically do not accumulate retrieval experience. Semanti...
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.
arXiv:2509.20377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks...
arXiv:2510.13935v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The facts a language model stores are tied to its parameter count, so small models that fit on edge devices fail on expert problems, which ne...
arXiv:2608. 20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often fail to answer questions about a bounded document collection when the source documents are not retrieved at inference time.
arXiv:2606. 06546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for education requires measuring how models teach, not only what they know.
Corpus2Skill is a retrieval architecture that transforms an enterprise knowledge base into a hierarchical skill directory, enabling an LLM agent to navigate from high-level summaries to specific documents and backtrack when necessary. On an enterprise customer‑support benchmark, it outperforms single‑shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical‑retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines in answer quality and grounding, with a moderate cost tradeoff. An eleven‑dataset study shows that corpus navigation excels on single‑domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy but is less effective on open‑domain factoid pools or homogeneous‑tabular corpora, providing a design guideline for knowledge‑grounded systems.
arXiv:2608. 12720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory for persistent interactions, the retrieval mechanisms governing this memory are rarely treated as evolvable components.
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
The article reports that large language models can predict and collaboratively modulate human memory search during a semantic fluency task. By tracking and forecasting participants’ semantic retrieval patterns, the models outperform other humans in following these mental trajectories. This suggests that AI can serve as a cognitive tool to extend human abilities in open‑ended conceptual exploration and creative ideation.
The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."