arXiv AI

Self-Evolving Search Index

The paper introduces SELF-INDEX, a framework that allows an information retrieval index to autonomously evolve without human intervention. Its Optimizer diagnoses retrieval shortcomings, selectively updates index keys, and validates changes before applying them. Additionally, a Query Simulator proactively explores new demands, enabling the index to improve beyond current queries and consistently outperform existing optimization methods across various corpora and retrievers.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.

By Yongjia Lei, Nedim Lipka, Zhisheng Qi, Utkarsh Sahu, Koustava Goswami, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Yu Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

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 AI
Jun 15

Succeeding at Scale: Enterprise Retrieval Benchmark Construction and Index-Preserving Query Adaptation for Multi-Tenant Search

arXiv:2601. 04646v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale multi-tenant retrieval systems generate extensive query logs but lack curated relevance labels for effective domain adaptation, resulting in substantial underutilized "dark data.

By Prateek Jain, Shabari S Nair, Ritesh Goru, Prakhar Agarwal, Ajay Yadav, Yoga Sri Varshan Varadharajan, Constantine Caramanis
arXiv AI
Sep 16

ORDER: Task-Conditioned Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents

VikingRAG is a directory‑aware semantic data management system that reduces token usage in retrieval‑augmented generation by tightly integrating semantic and structural access. It employs multi‑round retrieval traces as reusable experience edges and an adaptive escalation strategy to avoid unnecessary multi‑round exploration. Experiments show that VikingRAG achieves comparable accuracy to state‑of‑the‑art methods while using only 11.6%–51.9% of their tokens, and further reductions to 5.1%–32.5% with trace reuse and escalation.

By Peiyuan Gao, Gaoyuan Zhang, Haojie Qin, Yahui Sun, Qianyi Zhang, Yunhao Zhang, Zeyu Wang, Wei Lu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

ICICLE: Expanding Retrieval with In-Context Documents

ICICLE is an in‑context indexing framework that expands generative retrieval by supplying newly added documents as inference‑time evidence. It generates document identifiers using both parametric memory and context‑provided document‑docid pairs, employing a [COPY] routing mechanism, preference‑based calibration, and large‑context adaptation to separate context‑grounded retrieval from parametric retrieval. Experiments on MS MARCO and NQ320K demonstrate that ICICLE improves retrieval of new documents while retaining performance on previously indexed documents without retraining the model.

By Yu-Chen Den, Yung-Yu Shih, Zhi Rui Tam, Kuan-Yu Chen, Pu-Jen Cheng, Yun-Nung Chen, Eugene Yang