arXiv AI

STAIR (STructure Aware Information Retriever): A novel dataset and LLM based retriever for document structure augmentation

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.

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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Corpus2Skill: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

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.

By Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Dense Retrieval with Query Likelihood Modeling

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.

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

ConvergeWriter: Data-Driven Bottom-Up Article Construction

ConvergeWriter introduces a bottom‑up, data‑driven framework for long‑form document generation that first retrieves exhaustive knowledge from a source corpus and clusters it into distinct knowledge groups. These clusters then guide the creation of a hierarchical outline and the final text, ensuring the output is strictly grounded in the retrieved material and traceable to its sources. Experiments on 14B and 32B LLMs show that this approach matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines, especially in scenarios requiring high factual fidelity and structural coherence.

By Binquan Ji, Jiaqi Wang, Ruiting Li, Xingchen Han, Yiyang Qi, Shichao Wang, Yifei Lu, Yuantao Han, Feiliang Ren
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Select, Don't Train: The Benefits of Modular Entity Disambiguation with LLM-Based Selection

The paper investigates modular entity disambiguation by separating candidate retrieval from entity selection. It compares sparse retrieval (BM25), Web KB search, and a dense retriever, all paired with large language model selectors. Results show that a training‑free BM25 retriever combined with an LLM selector achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the ZELDA benchmark, and the modular approach enables abstention when retrieval fails.

By Fina Polat, Daniel Daza, Pengyu Zhang, Klim Zaporojets, Paul Groth