Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
arXiv:2606. 04646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many real-world questions over business, legal, and scientific corpora are natural-language versions of database-style queries over records latent in text.
The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."
arXiv:2605. 06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented agents are increasingly the interface to large knowledge bases, yet most treat retrieval as a black box: they issue exploratory queries, inspect snippets, and reformulate until evidence emerges.
arXiv:2606. 02581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) faces a fundamental three-way tension: deeper retrieval improves factual grounding but inflates token costs and end-to-end latency.
LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches pre-materialize evidence via fixed chunking, embeddings, or persistent indexes: effective for lookup, yet costly, stale-prone, and committed to a granularity before the query is known.
arXiv:2606. 10460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown rapid progress in reading-based question answering (QA), where evidence is explicitly provided or can be trivially retrieved.
arXiv:2608.22856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A retrieval-augmented QA system can return different answers after an index expansion even when its requested model identifier, prompt, retrieval pol...
arXiv:2605. 09038v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Teaching language models to use search tools is not only a question of whether they search, but also of whether they issue good queries.
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
arXiv:2608. 15877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search and recommendation serve a shared discovery objective but encode intent differently.
arXiv:2607. 27172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall.