arXiv AI

Semantic Views: Certified Reuse of LLM Labels Across Semantic Queries

arXiv:2610. 12768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic query engines evaluate natural-language filters with a large language model, and every evaluation is a costly oracle call.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

Same Query, Different Answer: Run-to-Run Variance in Semantic Query Processing

The paper investigates run‑to‑run variance in semantic query engines that use large language models (LLMs) to evaluate rows. By re‑executing benchmarks (SemBench, LRO‑Bench, UDA‑Bench) and logging 1.2 million model calls, the authors find that between 0.07% and 10.2% of rows change output at temperature 0, with some tasks showing up to 24% change. They show that plan amplification can cause a large fraction of answers to differ, that many benchmark comparisons are unresolved, and that voting and calibrated cascades reduce but do not eliminate variance, leading to new reporting and design guidelines.

By Oktie Hassanzadeh, Dharmashankar Subramanian
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 17

English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck

The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."

By Vassili Philippov, Amro Salman, Dmitrii Andreev, Penny Hands, Emil Kaiumov, Pavel Katunin, Anton Nikolaev
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Closing the Operational Gap in Semantic Caching

Semantic caching reduces LLM inference costs by returning cached responses for semantically similar queries, but current evaluation using PR‑AUC only ranks scores and ignores usability at a fixed threshold, leading to poor deployment choices. The authors propose a cache‑aware metric, Precision–Cache Hit Ratio (P‑CHR) AUC, and an Operational Retention Rate (ORR) to measure how offline ranking quality translates to deployment. They decompose the operational gap into a recoverable threshold‑utility component and an irreducible structural component, showing that the gap is driven by the training objective rather than data scale and can be mitigated by score re‑normalization or objective changes, framing model selection as a threshold‑utility problem.

By Aditeya Baral, Radoslav Ralev, Iliya Sotirov Zhechev, Srijith Rajamohan, Jen Agarwal