Retrieval-augmented generation

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

6,383 stories · RSS feed

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Strictly Causal Streaming Video Anomaly Detection with a Theoretically-Grounded State-Space Core

The paper presents a strictly causal streaming video anomaly detector that updates a fixed‑size state in constant time per frame, eliminating the need for clip buffering or lookahead. Its core is a diagonal linear state‑space recurrence with a decay gate, trained via self‑supervised next‑embedding prediction on a frozen visual backbone. The authors derive a closed‑form link between the recurrence’s decay spectrum and detection delay, validate on UCSD Ped2 and CUHK Avenue, and report real‑time latency on Apple M3 Pro hardware (≈0.75 ms per frame).

By Yogesh Kumar
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Evidence Blindness in Direct Corpus Interaction: Persistent Navigation with AtlasNav

The paper introduces AtlasNav, a persistent multi‑view corpus‑navigation framework that organizes a corpus into a Corpus Atlas, enabling large‑language‑model agents to navigate efficiently under finite interaction budgets. AtlasNav reduces online inference cost by 30.21% and achieves 92.05% strict accuracy on BrowseComp‑Plus, while earlier and more rapidly realizing required evidence compared to dynamic‑workspace methods. The approach also transfers well to other corpora such as PhantomWiki and heterogeneous enterprise knowledge bases, demonstrating that effective agentic search relies on both accessible evidence and a reusable corpus representation.

By Hongyu Guo, Zhiyu Zheng, Zhao Cao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

QABBA: Error-Guaranteed Symbolic Time-Series Compression via Integer-Quantized Aggregation

QABBA is a quantized variant of the Adaptive Brownian Bridge-based Aggregation (ABBA) method that compresses long numerical time‑series into short symbolic sequences using integer‑quantized symbolic centers. It reduces parameter storage and enables integer arithmetic while providing rigorous error bounds—including a dimension‑free segment error, a time‑domain reconstruction error, a stability condition for symbolic assignment, and a bit‑allocation rule. The resulting symbolic strings can be fed directly into pretrained large language models, and experiments on several benchmark archives show a practical trade‑off among storage, reconstruction accuracy, and downstream predictive performance.

By Erin Carson, Xinye Chen, Fei He, Cheng Kang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

LLM-Guided Contextual Action Evaluation for Operational Decisions in Industrial Processes

The paper introduces LLM-Guided Contextual Action Evaluation (LCAE), a method that leverages a large language model to transform fixed industrial documents into a frozen action–observation–direction–delay relation basis. Recent numerical action–response history modulates the strength of these relations, creating a state‑conditioned nonlinear action‑effect field that both the actor and critic use for policy learning. LCAE integrates document semantics into maximum‑entropy policy learning without requiring the LLM or embedding model to run online during training or deployment.

By Youcheng Zong, Runda Jia, Dakuo He
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

A Multimodal Foundation Model for Longitudinal Patient Representation and Scalable Insight Generation in Oncology

arXiv:2608.24688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precision oncology necessitates a longitudinal model of patient state that captures cancer evolution and treatment over time, integrating multimodal ob...

By Eugene Vorontsov, Yi Kan Wang, Alican Bozkurt, Adam Casson, Ludmila Tydlitatova, Michal Zelechowski, Ezra E. W. Cohen, Jyoti D. Patel, Max Banaszak, Caitlin McWilliams, Shane Colley, Kate Sasser, Ryan Fukushima, Eric Lefkofsky, Razik Yousfi, Siqi Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

X-MULTI: VLM-based Imaging Factor Disentanglement for Factor-Aware Image Synthesis

arXiv:2608.24563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imaging factor disentanglement in text-to-image generation aims to independently control image acquisition properties such as types of camera lenses, s...

By Sonali Godavarthy, Matthias Neuwirth-Trapp, Tim-Felix Faasch, Maarten Bieshaar, Michael Moeller, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Danda Pani Paudel
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Relative Time Intervals Representation for Word-level Timestamping with Masked Training

The paper introduces a method for improving fine-grained, temporally aligned outputs in Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) by replacing absolute timestamps with relative timestamps, which reduces vocabulary size and enhances generalization. It proposes a hybrid fine‑tuning strategy that fully fine‑tunes the timestamp‑augmented embedding layer and language model head while applying LoRA to decoder layers, and introduces a masked timestamp training objective to prevent over‑reliance on ground‑truth timestamps. Experiments show significant gains in timestamp prediction accuracy without compromising transcription quality.

By Quanwei Tang, Zhiyu Tang, Xu Li, Dong Zhang, Shoushan, Guodong Zhou
arXiv AI
Aug 26

MetaRAG: Belief-Action Aligned Policy Optimization for Agentic RAG

MetaRAG introduces a belief-action aligned policy optimization framework for agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It incorporates Verify-first Action Generation and Internal Belief Probing to assess whether the current evidence is sufficient before taking an action, and uses a consistency reward gated by answer correctness to guide training. Experiments on seven public QA benchmarks demonstrate that MetaRAG improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing RL-based agentic RAG baselines, with benefits that transfer across research settings, optimizers, and model backbones.

By Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Jiamu Wang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Pengcheng Zhu, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Matched Excess-Outranker Regularization for Candidate-Set Interference in Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding

The paper introduces Matched Excess-Outranker Regularization (MEOR), a new host-level objective for continual knowledge graph embedding that addresses candidate-set interference caused by entity admission. MEOR compares newcomer pressure with matched old references, applying a one-sided penalty only when newcomers outcompete these references, thereby preserving the learner’s signal for legitimate new entities. Experiments on ENTITY-ComplEx and FBInc datasets show that MEOR improves historical current-universe mean reciprocal rank and reduces candidate-set interference, outperforming several baseline regularizers.

By Hao Ren, Junbin Gao, Jiaojiao Jiang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

HMGCLIP: Heterogeneous Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning for E-commerce Representation Learning

HMGCLIP is a unified multimodal embedding framework that uses a heterogeneous hypergraph to capture both fine‑grained and coarse‑grained product attributes. By mining structure‑aware hard negatives and aligning multi‑granular semantics at relation and hyperedge levels, it enables a dual‑granularity inference mechanism that dynamically fuses attribute evidence. Experiments on a new fine‑grained e‑commerce dataset and the public MAVE benchmark show that HMGCLIP outperforms strong multimodal encoders, MLLMs, and e‑commerce baselines.

By Qiuyu Zhu, Yi Gao, Zhichao Wan, Mingyang Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 26

PhysMLLMs: Spatial Priors for Unified Referring Segmentation and Grounded Reasoning of Images and Videos

PhysMLLMs introduces physics-inspired spatial continuity priors into video multimodal large language models to address spatio‑temporal inconsistencies such as jitter, drift, and identity switches. The method, called Global Representation Prior Alignment (REPA‑Global), distills global visual representations from a frozen DINOv2 teacher during training, aligning student representations without affecting inference speed. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks show improved segmentation mask quality and cross‑frame consistency, especially for challenging scenarios involving small targets, fast motion, occlusion, and distractors, while maintaining comparable performance on single‑frame image segmentation and general VLM tasks.

By Siyao Yan, Bo Han, Jisheng Dang, Bimei Wang, Shude Wang, Hong Peng, Yulan Guo, Jianhuang Lai, Bin Hu, Tat-SengChua
arXiv AI
Aug 26

FedV-KGQA: Multi-Hop Question Answering over Vertically Partitioned Knowledge Graphs

FedV-KGQA is a framework for multi-hop question answering over knowledge graphs that are vertically partitioned across different organizations. It allows entities to be shared while each silo retains disjoint sets of relations, using local graph enrichment and knowledge graph embeddings so that raw triples and relation parameters never leave the silo. The system includes a topic entity anchoring mechanism to ground questions in the correct graph neighborhood without runtime inter-silo communication, and it achieves performance close to centralized systems on three benchmarks, including 3-hop reasoning and robustness to embedding perturbations.

By Md Saikat Islam Khan Bappy, Oshani Seneviratne
arXiv AI
Aug 26

From Gradient-Boosted Trees to Deep Recommenders: Practical Lessons from Migrating a Production Customer Support Recommender

The paper documents the migration of a live conversational recommendation system from a gradient‑boosted multiclass model to a pairwise‑binary deep recommender. It explains how reformulating the task, using negative sampling, noise injection, and attention pooling over transcript chunks enabled the new model to handle dynamic, multimodal data and long conversation context. The authors compare several architectures and loss functions, showing that the deep recommender matches or surpasses the CatBoost baseline, especially in later conversational stages.

By Sonia Sharma, Jeyendran Balakrishnan, Shreya Rajpal, Swapnil Parekh, Nagaraj Janardhana, Andrew Mattarella-Micke
arXiv AI
Aug 26

PHMForge: Evaluating LLM Agents on Industrial Prognostics through MCP-Native, Algorithm-Grounded Tools

PHMForge is an evaluation environment that tests large language model agents on industrial prognostics tasks using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It provides 99 SME-authored scenarios across eight asset classes, 39 MCP-native tools wrapping published PHM algorithms, and deterministic evaluators that separate protocol fluency, reasoning, instrumentation, and tool use. The benchmark shows that the best agent configuration achieves 80.8% pass@1, with orchestration and tool sequencing errors as the main failure modes, and demonstrates the limitations of static retrieval for prognostic computation.

By Yusheng Li, Tianjun Feng, Yunfeng Chen, Chun-Yi Tsai, Yihan Sun, Ayan Das, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Giraffe: A Mapping Architecture from Hidden Text Representations to Visual Embeddings for Efficient Graphic Design

The paper introduces Giraffe, a new mapping architecture that converts hidden text token representations into visual embeddings for graphic design tasks. It uses a single [IMG] token per image and two shallow MLP blocks—one for training and one for inference—to compress and expand embeddings, trained with six loss functions. The approach achieves strong performance in both image‑to‑design and text‑to‑design generation while remaining lightweight.

By Nejla Ghaboosi