arXiv Computation and Language

Cross-Loop Query Handoff: How Later Loops Redirect Two-Hop Retrieval in the Ouro Looped Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Listening to the Wise Few: Query-Key Alignment Unlocks Latent Correct Answers in Large Language Models

arXiv:2410.02343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) routinely fail to output the correct option in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) while encoding the answer int...

By Eduard Tulchinskii, Kristian Kuznetsov, Laida Kushnareva, Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrei Andriiainen, Irina Piontkovskaya, Evgeny Burnaev, Serguei Barannikov
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Beyond Retrieval Failure: Understanding Why LLMs Miss Evidence in Multi-Hop RAG

The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) miss evidence in multi‑hop retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). It introduces ExecutionRAG, a training‑free register that tracks open sub‑questions and their supporting evidence, allowing the authors to distinguish between true retrieval failures and search drift. Using this method on 1,000 MuSiQue questions, the study shows a significant reduction in missed evidence but also reveals that other error types, such as premature resolutions and abstentions, increase, shifting the bottleneck from search guidance to evidence verification.

By Jiaqi Wei, Wenxuan Huang, Chengdong Xu, Xiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

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 AI
Oct 27

TriageRAG: Failure-Aware Self-Training for Adapting Retrieval-Augmented Language Models to Specialized Domains

TriageRAG is a failure‑aware self‑training method for retrieval‑augmented language models that adapts them to specialized domains using only unlabeled text. It probes each self‑generated question with and without retrieved context, classifies the result into one of four categories (known, solved, context‑failure, retrieval‑failure), and routes each category to a tailored training signal, including a parametric route that teaches the reader to answer when retrieval misses. Experiments on 11 datasets across three domains and on CS‑Bench show that TriageRAG outperforms a budget‑matched SimRAG by 1.2–6.4 points and uniquely recovers closed‑book performance whenever retrieval harms the base model.

By Samarth Varshney, Ritu Yadav
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Diagnosing and Mitigating Retrieval Bottlenecks in LLM-Based Cold-Start Recommendation

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)