arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Where to Look and What to Use: Retrieve-Localize-Generate for Long-Term Conversational Memory Question Answering

arXiv:2609.07093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions by accessing external knowledge and has been widely a...

By Yifan Wang, Xinkui Lin, Yongxiu Xu, Shen Gao, Ruochen Yang, Kun Huang, Yubin Wang, Jie Wu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu, Shuo Shang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

arXiv:2604. 23336v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs.

By Teng Chen, Sheng Xu, Feixiang Guo, Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
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 Computation and Language
Aug 31

Entity-Memory Graph Retrieval Improves Evidence Coverage in Long-Conversation Question Answering

Entity-Memory graph retrieval preserves dialogue turns as verbatim memory nodes, links repeated mentions via shared entities, and connects adjacent memories with chronological edges. During retrieval, the system gates through entities, fuses semantics, and performs one‑hop chronological recovery before dense backfill, allowing it to keep neighboring memories that dense cosine ranking might miss. On 1,986 questions from ten LoCoMo conversations, this graph retrieval method increases official evidence recall at top‑k 25 from 79.7468 % to 84.4842 %, with the advantage extending from top‑k 5 to 50, though it does not improve overall final‑answer F1.

By Shumao Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Beyond the Final Embedding: Retrieving Memories from Token-Level Evidence

The paper introduces a memory-augmented retrieval method that leverages token-level evidence instead of relying solely on single-vector embeddings. By performing sparse token matching and aggregating scores with whole-memory similarity, the approach improves retrieval performance across eight benchmarks and various model families without extra training. An optional low-rank query adapter can further boost results when supervised.

By Han Luo, Zhan Zhuang, Xu He, Jujia Zhao, Yu Li, Suqin Yuan, Dong Li, Lei Feng