The paper introduces a three‑stage training pipeline that builds compact, efficient dense retrievers without requiring ground‑truth relevance labels. Using cross‑lingual alignment, relational knowledge distillation, and contrastive fine‑tuning, the authors develop PolDense (six Polish models ranging from 17 M to 1 B parameters) and EuroDense (a 435 M‑parameter model covering nine European languages). Extensive evaluation on 41 Polish and 150 multilingual tasks shows that PolDense‑1B outperforms larger retrievers up to 9 B parameters, while EuroDense leads in task‑averaged and language‑averaged performance among models below 1 B parameters.
By S{\l}awomir Dadas, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata, Ma{\l}gorzata Gr\k{e}bowiec, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz
arXiv:2607. 26070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agentic search systems are often evaluated as if the underlying LLM were the only component that matters, yet their measured performance also depends on the surrounding search environment: the Wikipedia snapshot, preprocessing pipeline, chunking policy, retrieval backend, tool schema, observation format, and answer submission rule.
By Guanming Xiong, Penghui Zhang
arXiv:2606. 05901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed the landscape of Natural Language Processing.
By Christopher J. Wedge, Joshua Stutter, Danny Dixon, Jacek Ca{\l}a
The paper introduces a new perspective on entity rarity in multimodal entity linking by using knowledge‑graph structural metrics instead of popularity metrics, revealing many rare entities previously overlooked. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art models suffer a 15.4–39.9% accuracy drop on these rare‑entity slices. The authors propose a training‑free framework that combines reasoning and retrieval with a vision‑language model, achieving a 6.9% overall accuracy gain and up to 23.3% improvement on rare entities, and release a new benchmark MERLIN‑Rare for focused evaluation.
By Parinthapat Pengpun, Simran Khanuja, Graham Neubig
arXiv:2607. 21274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present CUP, a Greek book retrieval benchmark consisting of 868 catalog records and 104 expert-annotated queries with graded relevance judgments.
By Katerina Papantoniou, Panagiotis Papadakos, Theodore Patkos, Dimitris Garefalakis, Nikos Vardakis, Dimitris Plexousakis
The paper introduces TriviaRoomQA, a multilingual benchmark of 3,300 parallel multiple-choice questions across 288 topics, plus an additional 5,340 French-only questions. It evaluates 30 open-weight large language models (7–70 B parameters) from various regions, finding strong performance on knowledge-intensive subjects like history and geography but weaker results on everyday popular‑culture topics such as celebrities, music, movies, and news. The study also shows that model performance varies across languages for the same questions, indicating that factual knowledge access is not always language‑independent.
By Anna Mosolova, Djam\'e Seddah