arXiv Machine Learning

Signed but Steerable: Measuring and Closing the Text-Vector Integrity Gap in Offline Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Where Post-Training Quantization Breaks Text Embedders: A Measured Map Across Four Embedder Families

arXiv:2609. 16391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weight-only post-training quantization is the cheapest way to shrink a retrieval embedder, and the received advice for applying it -- protect the embedding table, allocate bits by module sensitivity, prefer a ranking-aware objective over weight reconstruction -- was carried into LLM quantization largely intact.

By Hyojung Han
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

CamoDocs: A Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Using Camouflaged Documents

arXiv:2608. 28389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) augments LLMs with external documents, but public or user-editable sources expose RAG systems to data poisoning: attackers can inject malicious documents to steer outputs toward targeted answers.

By Jaewon Jung, Haizhong Zheng, Hongsun Jang, Jaeyong Song, Beidi Chen, Jinho Lee
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

RAGAL: A Frugal, Fully Local Retrieval-Augmented Assistant for Technical Support at a Government Agency

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 Machine Learning
Sep 4

Spruce: Scalable Private Outsourced Retrieval Using Compact Embeddings

Spruce is a system that enables scalable private outsourced retrieval by learning compact binary embeddings and using efficient Hamming-distance computation under a two‑server multi‑party computation protocol. It replaces costly corpus‑wide embedding scoring with a fixed‑radius protocol that avoids multi‑round candidate selection, and introduces private cluster pruning and a one‑core dealer to reduce computation and eliminate OT preprocessing bottlenecks. Across corpora of 383K–5.42M documents, Spruce maintains original search quality while achieving up to 31.5× higher throughput and reducing query times to a few seconds.

By Peichun Hua, Yunming Xiao
arXiv AI
Oct 2

MOMAT: Mixture of Multiple Atlases for Low-Power Jailbreak Defense of Quantized LLMs

MOMAT (Mixture of Multiple Atlases) is a hardware‑enhanced safety framework designed to defend quantized large language models (qLLMs) on edge devices against jailbreak attacks. It uses a collection of semantic atlases—each containing harmful or benign sample clusters and policy templates—to perform domain‑localized Retrieval‑Augmented Generation. A lightweight Mixture of Experts detector evaluates top‑k similarity features retrieved by a Compute‑in‑Memory (CiM) accelerated engine, achieving a 4.69 × 10⁶‑fold speedup and a 2.5 × 10⁵‑fold energy reduction compared to DRAM‑based baselines while matching state‑of‑the‑art defense performance.

By Boyang Li, Bingyu Shen, Weihao Hong, Zhiyuan Jiang, Xinlei Guan, Yan Ma, Miles Q. Li, Yi Sheng, Ruiyang Qin
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Spruce: Scalable Private Outsourced Retrieval Using Compact Embeddings

Spruce is a system that enables secure, private retrieval of large document collections outsourced to untrusted clouds by learning compact binary embeddings that preserve search quality while drastically reducing computation and communication. It replaces expensive corpus-wide embedding scoring with efficient Hamming-distance calculations under a two-server multi-party computation protocol, and introduces a fixed-radius protocol, private cluster pruning, and a one-core dealer to further cut latency and bandwidth usage. Across corpora ranging from 383K to 5.42M documents, Spruce maintains original search quality, achieving up to 6.7× faster full scans and 22.9× speedups with pruning, while retaining over 94% of the original NDCG.