Retrieval-augmented generation

Retrieval pipelines, vector search, chunking and reranking: how models are grounded in a corpus instead of their weights.

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arXiv AI
Sep 4

Traceable TTS: Toward Watermark-Free TTS with Strong Traceability

The paper introduces Traceable TTS, a framework that enables Text‑to‑Speech systems to attribute synthesized speech to their source models without embedding explicit watermarks. By jointly training the TTS model and a discriminator, the method improves traceability generalization while maintaining or slightly enhancing audio quality. This represents the first attempt at watermark‑free TTS with strong traceability, and the authors plan to release the code to support further research.

By Yuxiang Zhao, Yunchong Xiao, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Shuai Wang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

SignSeek: Learning Transferable Representations for Sign Dictionary Retrieval

SignSeek is a new method for learning transferable sign representations that enables efficient retrieval of signs from dictionaries using only a query video. It employs contrastive learning with saliency‑guided articulator masking, aligning same‑gloss signs across signers while focusing on the single most critical articulator per sign. Trained on 266K samples from multiple sign languages, SignSeek achieves state‑of‑the‑art cross‑corpus retrieval performance and zero‑shot generalisation to unseen British Sign Language, also improving isolated sign recognition and subtitle alignment.

By Sobhan Asasi, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Auditing Patient Privacy in Medical Generative Models: Scalable Memorization Detection with DeepSSIM++

DeepSSIM++ is a self‑supervised similarity metric designed to audit memorization in medical generative models at scale. It aggregates multi‑scale features and uses anatomy‑preserving augmentations to create an embedding space where cosine similarity approximates SSIM, removing the need for exact pixel‑level registration. Compared to existing baselines, DeepSSIM++ improves Macro F1 by 33–46 percentage points and speeds up large‑scale similarity computation by several orders of magnitude.

By Antonio Scardace, Francesco Guarnera, Sebastiano Battiato, Daniele Rav\`i
Towards Data Science
Sep 3

Tables in PDFs for RAG: Don’t Flatten the Grid

The article titled "Tables in PDFs for RAG: Don’t Flatten the Grid" discusses Enterprise Document Intelligence, presenting a diagnostic and five composable operations rather than a decision tree. It appears in the Vol.1 #B4 issue of the publication and was first posted on Towards Data Science.

By Kezhan Shi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

A Peer-Relative Representation Learning Framework for Energy Inefficiency Identification in Mobile Network Sites

The paper introduces an unsupervised peer-relative representation learning framework to detect energy inefficiencies in mobile network sites. It uses a novel energy-aware Minimum Distortion Embedding that incorporates an energy-based repulsion mechanism, creating a low-dimensional space where sites with unusually high consumption are displaced from their peers. The resulting anomaly scores help operators prioritize field investigations, outperforming traditional anomaly detection baselines and supporting large-scale energy-efficiency optimization.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Rent-a-RAG: Embedding-Space Watermarks for Auditing Third-Party RAG

Rent‑a‑RAG introduces DirBucket, a provider‑side semantic watermarking system that embeds documents with meaning‑preserving paraphrases biased toward secret directions, allowing black‑box auditing of document reuse in multi‑provider retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). The method consistently detects non‑compliance on a challenging benchmark, achieving strong target detection with no false positives and surviving adversarial post‑answer laundering. DirBucket’s detection transfers unchanged to real‑world corpora in clinical, cyber‑threat‑intelligence, and legal domains, demonstrating that embedding‑space watermarking can make third‑party RAG document reuse statistically auditable.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

The Impact of Synthetic Data Augmentation on Discourse-Pragmatic Function Classification

The study examines how the geometric placement of synthetic data affects discourse-pragmatic function classification. Using 410 annotated instances of the word "look" and synthetic examples generated by Llama 3.1, the authors partitioned the synthetic data by cosine distance in RoBERTa space and compared six training conditions. While all augmentation conditions improved macro‑F and accuracy over a real‑only baseline, the nearest synthetic examples (NEAR) yielded the largest macro‑F gain (0.113) and a distance‑balanced mix achieved the highest accuracy (0.748), though none improved AUC.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Tree species mapping in Denmark: A comparison of spectral-temporal features with geospatial foundation model embeddings

The study maps tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and Earth Observation data, comparing manually engineered spectral‑temporal features (STF) with embeddings from foundation models TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Random forest, XGBoost, and MLP classifiers were evaluated, with the STF‑based MLP achieving the highest macro F1 scores (0.843 for pure stands, 0.653 for mixed stands). The best model was applied nationally to produce a 10 m resolution tree species map, achieving 79.9% area‑adjusted accuracy and released as an open‑access resource.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

When Retrieval Helps: Selective Retrieval for Single-Turn Mental-Health QA

The paper investigates how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) affects single‑turn mental‑health question answering. It finds that always using retrieval improves response specificity but can lower overall quality and increase safety‑related failures. A lightweight selective retrieval policy, guided by psychoeducational, coping, and safety needs, better balances these trade‑offs by activating retrieval only when necessary.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Spruce: Scalable Private Outsourced Retrieval Using Compact Embeddings

Spruce is a system that enables secure, private retrieval of large document collections outsourced to untrusted clouds by learning compact binary embeddings that preserve search quality while drastically reducing computation and communication. It replaces expensive corpus-wide embedding scoring with efficient Hamming-distance calculations under a two-server multi-party computation protocol, and introduces a fixed-radius protocol, private cluster pruning, and a one-core dealer to further cut latency and bandwidth usage. Across corpora ranging from 383K to 5.42M documents, Spruce maintains original search quality, achieving up to 6.7× faster full scans and 22.9× speedups with pruning, while retaining over 94% of the original NDCG.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

CoViT: Instance-Correspondence Contrastive Learning for Vision Transformer

CoViT introduces a self‑supervised framework that enhances Vision Transformers with instance‑aware representations by leveraging geometry‑guided contrastive learning. It refines attention maps to generate instance masks and constructs triplets that mine the hardest intra‑ and inter‑instance examples, driving a contrastive loss that reduces intra‑instance variance while increasing inter‑instance margins. The method yields consistent AP gains of over 2 points on instance‑level tasks without requiring extra decoders or labels.

By Yisen Wang, Zhirong Wu, Limin Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

REAP: Relation-Aware Elicitation and Parsing for Closed-Book Knowledge Base Construction from LLMs

The REAP system tackles the AKBC Shared Task 2026, aiming to build knowledge bases from language models without fine‑tuning and within a 32‑B parameter budget. It uses structured chain‑of‑thought reasoning, relation‑specific queries, and a reasoning‑based empty‑set gate to elicit knowledge, then directly extracts it into valid JSON arrays. Evaluated on the test set with the Mistral‑Small‑24B‑Instruct‑2501 model, REAP achieves a macro‑F1 of 0.62, notably high scores on countryLandBordersCountry (0.95), companyTradesAtStockExchange (0.73), and hasArea (0.77).

By Thanh-Dan Bui, Thanh-Trung Do, Tuan-Phong Nguyen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Reviewing the Reviewer: LLM-Assisted Reviewer Feedback Generation for Guideline Compliance

The paper presents an LLM-driven framework that splits peer reviews into argumentative segments, detects multiple co-occurring issues such as lazy thinking and lack of specificity, and generates targeted, guideline-aware feedback using issue-specific templates. An iterative, reranking-based generation algorithm refines the feedback, and a controlled rewriting study shows it can reduce guideline violations by up to 92.4%. The authors also release LazyReviewPlus, a multi-label dataset of 1,309 sentences annotated for detecting lazy thinking and lack of specificity.

By Sukannya Purkayastha, Qile Wan, Anne Lauscher, Lizhen Qu, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Incremental Pooled LLM Evaluation for Cost-Effective Retrieval Model Selection

The paper proposes an incremental pooled LLM evaluation method for selecting retrieval models in production Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. By having a language model judge the union of documents retrieved by current candidates and expanding the pool only with new documents from added systems, the approach reuses judgments across all systems. Experiments on four benchmarks and a financial news QA deployment show strong correlation with gold-standard rankings, high preservation of pairwise orderings, and significant cost savings—up to 4.9× lower evaluation cost and 65–80% judgment reuse.

By Max Nelson, Hanoz Bhathena, Aviral Joshi, Saket Sharma
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Cite or Decline: A Strict Course-Grounded Chatbot for STEM Lecture Videos

The paper presents a semester-long deployment of the VideoPoints platform, featuring a retrieval‑augmented chatbot that answers questions using only the active course’s lecture materials and provides clickable, timestamped citations. Across 833 interactions, 70.5% of messages included citations, no cross‑course references were made, and the bot declined to answer when no lecture evidence matched. The study also shows that the system improves correct‑lecture retrieval by 6.3 percentage points over dense‑only retrieval on the EduVidQA benchmark.

By S M Masrur Ahmed, Jaspal Subhlok
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

DynaTokens: Controlling Token Dynamics for Continual Video-Language Understanding

The paper introduces DynaTokens, a transformer-based token generator that produces fine‑tuning tokens on demand for continual VideoQA with multimodal large language models. It uses shared generation weights and meta‑learning‑inspired regularisers to reduce task interference and forgetting, connecting the objective to sharpness‑aware optimisation for flatter cross‑task minima. Experiments on standard continual VideoQA benchmarks show that DynaTokens achieves higher average accuracy, lower forgetting, better zero‑shot generalisation, and robust cross‑modal transfer in a new ImageQA→VideoQA protocol.

By Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Celso De Melo, Flora D. Salim
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

DLM-One: Diffusion Language Models for One-Step Sequence Generation

The paper introduces DLM-One, a score‑distillation framework that enables one‑step sequence generation with continuous diffusion language models (DLMs). By aligning a student model’s outputs with a pretrained teacher DLM’s score function in the forward‑diffused noisy space, DLM-One removes the need for iterative refinement. Experiments across various DLM architectures show up to ~2000× speedup in sampling steps and ~500× in wall‑clock time while retaining competitive performance, and the authors propose an adversarially‑regularized two‑stage training scheme to mitigate student degeneration.

By Tianqi Chen, Shujian Zhang, Mingyuan Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Freeze, Diffuse, Decode: Task-Aware Adaptation of Transformer Embeddings for Antimicrobial Peptide Design

Freeze, Diffuse, Decode (FDD) is a diffusion-based framework that adapts pre‑trained transformer embeddings to downstream tasks while preserving their geometric structure. By propagating supervised signals along the intrinsic manifold of frozen embeddings, FDD produces low‑dimensional, predictive, and interpretable representations. In antimicrobial peptide design, these representations support property prediction, retrieval, and latent‑space interpolation.

By Pankhil Gawade, Adam Izdebski, Myriam Lizotte, Kevin R. Moon, Jake S. Rhodes, Guy Wolf, Ewa Szczurek
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

CodePoisonRAG: Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation

The paper introduces CodePoisonRAG, a framework that poisons retrieval-augmented code generation systems by transforming benign code artifacts into malicious ones. It injects CWE-specific vulnerabilities and false safety claims into a single task-matched artifact, achieving high success rates across multiple generators and even against a defense system. The study demonstrates that attackers can target and propagate specific weaknesses without altering the underlying language model.

By Varun Gadey, Ziad Marey, Alexandra Dmitrienko