arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ABAI at COLIEE 2026 Task 1: Multi-Stage Retrieval with GraphRAG-Enhanced Meta-Learning, and a Post-Hoc Study of the Cross-Validation-to-Test Gap

The paper reports the ABAI submission to COLIEE 2026 Task 1, a case law retrieval challenge that suppresses cited passages, and details a four‑stage retrieval pipeline: multi‑view BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, neural reranking, graph‑based features via a graph attention network, and a LightGBM meta‑learner over 34 features. The best run achieved an F1 score of 0.177 on the official test set, compared to a cross‑validated 0.311, and the authors attribute the gap to a recall ceiling, temporal distribution shift, and threshold miscalibration. A controlled post‑hoc study examined the impact of threshold transfer, decision quality across time, and query similarity, and identified specific remedies—such as BM25 length‑normalisation tuning, event‑triple views, and dense fusion—that improved recall, while other interventions had no effect.

By Minhan Cho, Soyoung Park, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han
arXiv AI
Sep 4

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

SHELF is a Python system that creates synthetic, controlled benchmark data for evaluating large language models on bibliographic tasks such as classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. It generates 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies and compares methods like TF, TF‑IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and zero‑shot decoders, reporting performance metrics such as 0.8887 for subject classification and 0.2605 for genre‑form classification. The tool also allows independent variation of bibliographic facets and can produce unseen documents beyond a model’s training cutoff, with results indicating that model rankings transfer more reliably than absolute scores when compared to other benchmarks.

By Michael J. Bommarito II
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

SHELF is a Python system that creates controlled benchmark data and evaluation tasks for libraries and archives, using labelled taxonomies, writing specifications, and a generation budget. It generates 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies and supports tasks such as classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. The release compares various methods—including TF, TF-IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and zero-shot decoders—showing that sparse methods remain competitive on classification and that SHELF can vary bibliographic facets independently while generating new, verifiably unseen documents.

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 AI
Sep 25

Automated Regulatory Compliance Question Answering in Financial Services with Domain-Adapted Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation pipeline for answering regulatory compliance questions in finance. It builds a three‑stage retriever on LegalBERT and a compact 2B–12B generator served with 4‑bit quantization, achieving a Recall@10 of 0.774 on the ObliQA benchmark and improving answer quality via RAFT‑LoRA fine‑tuning. However, the adapted models fail to transfer to Australian case‑law questions, and a closed‑book model performs almost as well while lacking verifiable grounding.

By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Abhishek Pillai, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Dhananjay Bhardwaj, Lorenz Sparrenberg, David Berghaus, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa