Public institutions hold large volumes of sensitive documents and support tickets that cannot leave the premises, ruling out cloud-hosted language models entirely. We report on RAGAL, a retrieval-augmented assistant for the technical-support team of AFIR, the Romanian Agency for Financing Rural Investments, built and operated under three hard constraints: zero data egress (no external API calls, even for synthetic data), a read-only mandate (the assistant drafts, humans execute), and a single 8 GB consumer laptop as the only development and training machine.
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:2511. 16681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently.
By Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu
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:2607. 06229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Major cloud data platforms now expose large language model capabilities as native SQL functions, enabling analysts to perform classification, filtering, sentiment analysis, extraction, similarity search, and aggregation within ordinary SQL queries.
By Tianyang Liu, Canwen Xu, Fangyu Lei, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Jixuan Chen, Tao Yu, Julian McAuley, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He
arXiv:2606. 02737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrieval models exhibit positional bias: retrieval effectiveness degrades when relevant information appears later in a passage (Zeng et al.
By Andrianos Michail, Elias Schuhmacher, Juri Opitz, Simon Clematide, Rico Sennrich
arXiv:2608. 06196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents backed by large skill libraries must decide which skills to load and in what order.
By Indivara Kolluru, Nathan Sportsman
arXiv:2606. 19079v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has led to model ecosystems in which a single backbone is paired with many task-specialized adapters.
By Enrico Cassano, Micha{\l} Brzozowski, Paolo Mandica, Zuzanna Dubanowska, Neo Christopher Chung
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:2510. 04127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) search underpins large-scale retrieval, increasingly within the retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that ground large language models, yet the methods that address it have multiplied across communities until they are seldom read as a single field.
By Sean Moran
arXiv:2607. 06799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating uncertainty in AI-generated SQL queries requires estimating whether a query is correct, where correct means it executes to the same result as a human-written reference.
By Robert Richardson
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.
By Sanjay Mishra