arXiv AI

Learning from What You Retrieve: Online RL Fine-Tuning for Semantic Retrieval

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Semantic Retrieval for Product Search in E-Commerce

arXiv:2606. 01504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic retrieval in e-commerce must handle short, noisy, and colloquial queries over large product catalogs with fine-grained attribute distinctions.

By Nikhil Kothari, Saksham Samdani, Ritam Mallick, Praveen Gupta, Ankit Vijay, Surender Kumar
arXiv AI
1d ago

NE-R1: Enhancing Named Entity Recognition Model via Reinforcement Learning

NE‑R1 is a framework that improves Named Entity Recognition by using a retrieval‑on‑demand mechanism and a two‑stage training process that includes instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with chain‑of‑thought. It balances the use of internal model parameters and external knowledge through a multi‑dimensional reward that considers accuracy and retrieval benefit. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results, improving in‑domain F1 by 2.52% and zero‑shot cross‑domain F1 by 1.18%.

By Meixuan Chen, Hehan Li, Ruizhi Zhao, Xin Lu, peizhi xu, Liwei Qian, LI Meifang, shuanglong li, Hanmeng Liu, Xin Pei, Yanbiao Ma
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 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 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 Machine Learning
4d ago

Mine and Refine: Optimizing Graded Relevance in E-commerce Semantic Search Retrieval

The paper introduces Mine and Refine, a two‑stage contrastive training framework designed to improve embedding‑based retrieval for large‑scale e‑commerce search. It tackles graded relevance, hard‑sample mining, and unstable similarity separability by using a lightweight LLM as a scalable labeler and a multi‑level circle loss to enforce margin‑controlled separation across relevance levels. The method has been deployed in production across multiple product verticals, yielding statistically significant increases in user engagement, gross order value, and retrieval relevance metrics.

By Jiaqi Xi, Raghav Saboo, Luming Chen, Johny Rufus, Aditya Dodda, Ved Sampath, Kenny Chi, Elyse Winer, Akshad Viswanathan, Martin Wang, Sudeep Das
arXiv AI
Aug 13

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.

By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Generative Reasoning Re-ranker

arXiv:2602. 07774v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge.

By Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
arXiv AI
Jul 1

GR2 Technical Report

arXiv:2606. 31984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial recommendation systems serve billions of users through a multi-stage funnel -- retrieval, early-stage ranking, and re-ranking -- where the final re-ranking step disproportionately shapes user engagement and downstream performance, particularly for carousel and grid display formats.

By Yufei Li (Yongkang), Zaiwei Zhang (Yongkang), Mingfu Liang (Yongkang), Kavosh Asadi (Yongkang), Jay Xu (Yongkang), Jimmy Kim (Yongkang), Chongyang Bai (Yongkang), Jieyi Zhang (Yongkang), Hongye Xie (Yongkang), Prachi Agrawal (Yongkang), Dian Yu (Yongkang), Tianyi Chen (Yongkang), Jean-Pascal Billaud (Yongkang), Garret Buell (Yongkang), YK (Yongkang), Zhu (Yang), Sachin Patil (Yang), Brooke Bian (Yang), Zhou Fang (Yang), Kevin Huang (Yang), Shiva Sudanagunta (Yang), Yuzhen Huang (Yang), Emma Lu (Yang), Chris O'Brien (Yang), Yang Song (Yang), Lihong Li (Yang), Jacob Tao (Yang), Zhicheng Zhu (Yang), Chao Li (Yang), Gaoxiang Liu (Yang), Neil Wu (Yang), Zhongyin Hu (Yang), Li Han (Yang), Loki Chen (Yang), Ming Lei (Yang), Greg Rehm (Yang), Siyuan Song (Yang), Tianwei Zhang (Yang), Li Li (Yang), Ketan Singh (Yang), Yavuz Yetim (Yang), Ilyas Atishev (Yang), Satendra Gera (Yang), Ashkan Sadeghi (Yang), Rachel Yan (Yang), Nikko Mizutani (Yang), Shuaiwen Wang (Yang), Song Yang (Yang), Zhijing Li (Yang), Jiang Liu (Yang), Mengying Sun (Yang), Fei Tian (Yang), Xiaohan Wei (Yang), Chonglin Sun (Yang), Parish Aggarwal (Yang), Kaushik Rangadurai (Yang), Zhi Hua (Yang), Frank Shyu (Yang), Ruchit Sharma (Yang), Liyuan Li (Yang), Shike Mei (Yang), Wenlin Chen (Yang), Santanu Kolay (Yang), Ben Schulte (Yang), Deepak Chandra (Yang), Adam (Yang), Song, Sandeep Pandey, Xi Liu, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon