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.
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.
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.
By Masataka Yoneda, Yusuke Matsushita, Go Kamoda, Kohei Suenaga, Takuya Akiba, Masaki Waga, Sho Yokoi
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).
By Zhichao Geng, Yang Yang
arXiv:2605. 11374v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time compute is widely believed to benefit only large reasoning models, leaving small models with nothing to gain.
By Han Xiao
arXiv:2608. 03860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19.
By Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md. Hasibul Hasan, Rofiqul Alam Shehab, Asab Azad
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.
By Teng Chen, Sheng Xu, Feixiang Guo, Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
arXiv:2605. 03344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation.
By Negar Arabzadeh, Wenjie Ma, Sewon Min, Matei Zaharia
arXiv:2606. 04536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing memory-augmented LLM agents store past experience exclusively in prompt space, as textual summaries or retrieved passages, while keeping model parameters frozen throughout a rollout.
By Tao Ren, Weiyao Luo, Hui Yang, Rongzhi Zhu, Xiang Huang, Yuchuan Wu, Bingxue Chou, Jieping Ye, Jiafeng Liang, Yongbin Li, Yijie Peng
arXiv:2606. 10621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern retrieval increasingly relies on dense and learned-sparse neural models that are effective but require encoding the entire corpus into a specialized index, rebuilt whenever the model changes.
By Arthur Satouf, Giulio D'Erasmo, Yuxuan Zong, Habiboulaye Amadou Boubacar, Pablo Piantanida, Benjamin Piwowarski
arXiv:2608. 06305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation over long documents is dominated by one design: chunk the text, embed the chunks, and surface the top-k nearest neighbours of the query.
By Sagar Tamang, Ayush Vyas, Tabarakul Hazarika
arXiv:2607. 19604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting factual knowledge into large language models (LLMs) reliably and at scale remains an open challenge.
By Nischay Dhankhar, Dos Baha, Abulhair Saparov