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 1

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

TEMPO is a unified model that adds temporally‑grounded capabilities to large audio‑language models, enabling timestamping of events, speakers, and sounds in audio, speech, and music. It introduces a supervised fine‑tuning stage featuring atomic timestamp tokens, a time‑aware projector with sinusoidal encodings, and a distance‑aware Gaussian loss, trained via a synthetic‑to‑real curriculum. Additionally, TEMPO employs reinforcement learning (GRPO) as a refinement step, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on a benchmark of 10K samples across five timestamping tasks, surpassing Audio Flamingo Next and Qwen3‑Omni.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Utathya Aich, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.

By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

BEACON: Behavioral and Semantic Enrichment of AlphaEarth Embeddings through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning

BEACON is a tri‑modal contrastive learning framework that enriches AlphaEarth embeddings by aligning physical representations from Earth‑observation imagery with semantic POI text and human behavioral POI visitation data, while keeping the deployed model image‑only. In a Houston case study, BEACON outperformed six baselines on nine downstream tasks, achieving up to 43% higher R² for obesity prevalence, 34% for poor mental health, and 22% for median household income under a linear probe.

By Hao Tian, Heng Cai, Yifan Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 1

E-SENS: Exclusion-Sensitive Penalization for Negative-Constraint Retrieval

E‑SENS is a training‑free reranking technique designed to improve negative‑constraint retrieval in retrieval‑augmented language models. It works by extracting a compact ‘trap query’ that represents the excluded concept and subtracting the similarity of this trap query from the original retrieval score, thereby reducing the influence of documents that mention the excluded concept. Experiments on the ExcluIR benchmark demonstrate that E‑SENS achieves a clear recall‑violation trade‑off across four embedding models and effectively reduces trap retrieval while preserving recall.

By Yerang Kim, Jiyoon Myung, Joohyung Han