arXiv:2608. 16621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time.
Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time. Put plainly, instead of re-deriving what a corpus means on every question, the work is done once when a document arrives and is thereafter merely consulted -- a compiler, not an interpreter, of meaning.
The paper argues that retrieval‑augmented question‑answering systems should perform semantic compilation at ingest time rather than re‑deriving meaning at query time. By building a maintained structure—incrementally updated embeddings and validated atomic claims—read operations become far cheaper, with experimental results showing higher accuracy and lower token usage compared to traditional chunk‑based retrieval. The authors present two proofs: cheaper incremental updates and superior performance on broadcast‑interview transcripts, suggesting a new systems agenda for compilation and read planning.
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.
The paper introduces Corpus Task Complexity (CTC), a metric that captures how a task’s difficulty scales with corpus size. It distinguishes low‑CTC tasks, whose difficulty grows linearly, from high‑CTC tasks, whose difficulty grows quadratically or more, and presents ten new high‑CTC tasks. Experiments show that models performing well on low‑CTC tasks often fail on high‑CTC tasks, highlighting the need for new approaches to large‑corpus reasoning.
The paper introduces ingest‑time fact compilation, an architecture that preprocesses and compiles corpus data into self‑contained facts with resolved revisions, deletions, and source trust. By storing this compiled state, query‑time models can retrieve answers directly, avoiding costly reconstruction from raw passages. Experiments show that this approach reduces read cost per question by 12.89× and token usage by 21.6× while maintaining accuracy.
Retrieval in the SQL setting has largely been studied as the task of finding, within a large collection of SQL statements, the statement that answers a natural-language question. At scale, however, a more fundamental retrieval problem precedes generation: schema retrieval, identifying the tables and columns a question requires in a database that may contain thousands of them, far more than fit in a model's context.
The paper introduces AtlasNav, a persistent multi‑view corpus‑navigation framework that organizes a corpus into a Corpus Atlas, enabling large‑language‑model agents to navigate efficiently under finite interaction budgets. AtlasNav reduces online inference cost by 30.21% and achieves 92.05% strict accuracy on BrowseComp‑Plus, while earlier and more rapidly realizing required evidence compared to dynamic‑workspace methods. The approach also transfers well to other corpora such as PhantomWiki and heterogeneous enterprise knowledge bases, demonstrating that effective agentic search relies on both accessible evidence and a reusable corpus representation.
Given a large corpus, the questions one might ask can vary -- from "When was the first human heart transplant?" to "What are all the contradictory claims in this literature?" -- but what makes some qu...
arXiv:2602. 10908v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.
arXiv:2609.37911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific queries are often brief, while relevant papers use specialized vocabulary. Generated query expansion can bridge this mismatch, but earlier...
arXiv:2606.16661v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across...
arXiv:2607. 00004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While advanced foundation models like ModernBERT significantly outperform older architectures in dense retrieval, they surprisingly lag behind the aging BERT-base baseline in learned sparse retrieval (LSR).