arXiv AI

STORM: Stepwise Token Optimization with Reward-Guided Beam Search

arXiv:2606. 10621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern retrieval increasingly relies on dense and learned-sparse neural models that are effective but require encoding the entire corpus into a specialized index, rebuilt whenever the model changes.

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
Sep 4

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.

By Vineet Kumar, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, vishwajeet kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Sachindra Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

SMART: LLM-Augmented Hybrid Retrieval for Dynamic Product Ads

arXiv:2607. 23121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) require retrieving relevant items from multi-million product catalogs, balancing two competing objectives: retargeting (re-surfacing known interests) and prospecting (discovering new categories).

By Congfei Zhang, Jingxiao Ma, Xiaodong Liu, Hsiang-wei Chao, Siman Wang, Ge Liu, Shantanu Aggarwal, Vincent Zhang, Meghana Missula, Rachel Liao, Zichu Li, Xiao Bai, Yunzhi Zhou, Yajun Wang, Zhe Liu, Jinchao Li, Yu Zhang
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)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

CoHyDE: Iterative Co-Training of LLM Rewriter & Dense Encoder for Tool 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.

By Vaishali Senthil, Ashutosh Hathidara, Sebastian Schreiber
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

F$^{2}$DR: A Fine-Grained Full-Pipeline Reward Framework for DeepSearch Workflows

The paper introduces F$^{2}$DR, a fine‑grained reward framework designed to evaluate end‑to‑end DeepSearch workflows, which involve planning, reflection, retrieval, and answer generation. F$^{2}$DR assesses workflows along three dimensions—Content, Trajectory, and Answer—to provide a comprehensive process‑level evaluation. The authors also present DeepSearch RM‑Bench, a benchmark that tests reward models in DeepSearch scenarios and shows strong discriminative power over existing open‑source models.

By Bojian Xiong (Tianjin University), Wentao Ding (Baidu Inc.), Yujing Lu (Baidu Inc.), Shaowei Zhang (Tianjin University), Ling Shi (Tianjin University), Jing Liao (Baidu Inc.), Yan Wang (Baidu Inc.), Yueyang Zhang (Baidu Inc.), Long Xia (Baidu Inc.), Zhiyuan Sun (Baidu Inc.), Daiting Shi (Baidu Inc.), Jingzhou He (Baidu Inc.), Yuqi Ren (Tianjin University), Deyi Xiong (Tianjin University)