While language models have become dramatically more capable, retrieval still largely relies on lexical matching or similarity in fixed embedding spaces. This creates a capability asymmetry: what the r...
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:2604. 23336v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs.
The paper introduces a three‑stage training pipeline that builds compact, efficient dense retrievers without requiring ground‑truth relevance labels. Using cross‑lingual alignment, relational knowledge distillation, and contrastive fine‑tuning, the authors develop PolDense (six Polish models ranging from 17 M to 1 B parameters) and EuroDense (a 435 M‑parameter model covering nine European languages). Extensive evaluation on 41 Polish and 150 multilingual tasks shows that PolDense‑1B outperforms larger retrievers up to 9 B parameters, while EuroDense leads in task‑averaged and language‑averaged performance among models below 1 B parameters.
Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.
arXiv:2609.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that fine-tuning decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for retrieval yields strong first-stage retrievers, with effectivene...
arXiv:2610.08463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context inference and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) handle evidence selection at vastly different scales, from a single long prompt to an...
arXiv:2604.05087v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as inference-time components in retrieval pipelines, for tasks such as query rewritin...
arXiv:2607. 23507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Choosing the right text embedding model is one of the most consequential -- and most frequently under-examined -- decisions in building a retrieval or search system, yet the model that tops a leaderboard is rarely the best choice for a given deployment.
The paper "Can Language Models Play the Wikipedia Game?" investigates how language models perform on an information‑retrieval task where players navigate from one Wikipedia article to a target using only article links. The authors compare sentence‑embedding models and large language models across five Wikipedia languages and five academic‑literature datasets, building extensive local graphs of Wikipedia pages and paper citations with OpenAlex. They benchmark these models against human and TF‑IDF baselines, finding that no model significantly outperforms humans, though the best models (GPT‑o3 mini, GPT‑4o, QwQ:32B, and DeepSeek‑R1:70B) achieve comparable success, with performance varying by language and topic.
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.
RIT‑RAG is a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines content retrieval with structural navigation of documents. It builds a tree for each document from its table of contents or sitemap, then uses retrieved chunk positions to induce manageable sub‑trees that an LLM agent can navigate, read selectively, and reformulate queries. Experiments on financial, scientific, and customer‑support benchmarks show RIT‑RAG outperforms vanilla, graph‑based, and agentic baselines, achieving up to 11.4‑point accuracy gains on the new EntQABench of 2.84 million technical‑documentation webpages.