Learning from What You Retrieve: Online RL Fine-Tuning for Semantic Retrieval
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2606. 01504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic retrieval in e-commerce must handle short, noisy, and colloquial queries over large product catalogs with fine-grained attribute distinctions.
arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
NE‑R1 is a framework that improves Named Entity Recognition by using a retrieval‑on‑demand mechanism and a two‑stage training process that includes instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with chain‑of‑thought. It balances the use of internal model parameters and external knowledge through a multi‑dimensional reward that considers accuracy and retrieval benefit. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results, improving in‑domain F1 by 2.52% and zero‑shot cross‑domain F1 by 1.18%.
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.
arXiv:2606. 29947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in recommender systems, with the expectation that semantic understanding will help in cold-start and long-tail regimes.
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.