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.
By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv:2606. 15998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals.
By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Shubham Chatterjee
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:2602. 09616v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend fundamentally on the retriever's ability to find relevant information.
By Zeinab Sadat Taghavi, Ali Modarressi, Hinrich Schutze, Andreas Marfurt
The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.
By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv:2608.21702v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM generation on retrieved documents, but the standard terminal retrieval stage--dense-vector similarity,...
By Jing Liu, Yongxing Qi, Muchen Jiang, Chengnan Hu, Qingqing Peng, Haoming Wang, Yuqing Wang, Yang Yu, Xu Zhang, Ting Wu
arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
By Yuhang Wu, Xiangqing Shen, Fanfan Wang, Cangqi Zhou, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Rui Xia
DECSELFMASK is a decoder‑only classification method that uses unlabeled clinical text to improve performance. It creates self‑supervised training examples by masking portions of the text identified as relevant through relevance attribution, then trains the model to reconstruct the masked tokens via next‑token prediction. Experiments on 136 tasks from 1.9 M Italian hospital notes show consistent gains across five models, outperforming base models (+9.1 Macro F1), continual pretraining (+6.3), and synthetic label generation (+12.5).
By Pietro Ferrazzi, Matteo Merler, Giovanni Bonetta, Alberto Lavelli, Bernardo Magnini
arXiv:2608. 16185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Xingjun Wang, Gongsheng Li, Qi Fan, Yunlin Mao, Luyan Su, Yingda Chen
The paper introduces ORDER, a task‑conditioned retrieval‑augmented generation framework that dynamically adapts both indexing and retrieval strategies to each incoming query. It first clusters questions to learn cluster‑specific chunking, metadata filtering, and reranking settings, then routes queries to the appropriate pre‑built index via nearest‑centroid assignment. Additionally, a supervised query router predicts relevant collections and a Uniform Multi‑source Sampler distributes the retrieval budget evenly across selected sources, yielding superior performance on heterogeneous historical archives compared to existing RAG systems.
By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez, Marie Puren
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.
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.
By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen