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 Machine Learning
Oct 8

MorphCL: Morphological Contrastive Learning for Inertial-based Human Activity Recognition

MorphCL introduces a self‑supervised pretraining framework for inertial‑based human activity recognition that explicitly models global motion structure through morphology‑aware grouping. By leveraging motion primitives and domain‑specific descriptors, MorphCL improves linear probing and fine‑tuning performance of encoders by up to 15 percentage points in F1‑score. Compared with existing foundation models, MorphCL‑pretrained encoders achieve comparable or better linear probing results while using 4,600× less data, and the learned embeddings exhibit clear, morphologically meaningful clusters that better separate kinematically similar activities.

By Marius Bock, Yuwei Zhang, Juergen Gall, Michael Moeller, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Cecilia Mascolo
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

Finding the Right Balance: Relevance and Diversity in LLM Retrieval

arXiv:2610.09412v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval diversification is widely available in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, yet prior studies disagree on whether it improves r...

By Guillaume Brouillette (Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec \`a Trois-Rivi\`eres, Trois-Rivi\`eres, Canada), Faustin Kagabo (Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec \`a Trois-Rivi\`eres, Trois-Rivi\`eres, Canada), Usef Faghihi (Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec \`a Trois-Rivi\`eres, Trois-Rivi\`eres, Canada), Nadia Ghazzali (Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec \`a Trois-Rivi\`eres, Trois-Rivi\`eres, Canada)
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Shared Gaussianization: What Gaussian Regularizers Certify About Contrastive Learning, and What They Miss

The paper introduces Shared Gaussianization (SG), a characteristic‑function test that evaluates Gaussianity of the average of two normalized views scaled by an independent χ_d radius. SG detects both misalignment and non‑uniformity in contrastive learning, vanishing exactly at aligned, uniform minimizers of population InfoNCE, and provides a sharp, dimension‑free bound on InfoNCE excess. The study also explores how SG behaves under different kernels, alignment weights, batch sizes, and latent‑variable models, revealing optimization gaps and the impact of nuisance channels.

By Ruoyu Zhao, Yuting Chen, Jinheng Zhang, Zhehao Zou, Tong Che
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

RACER: Reflective Agent Coupling Query Interpretation and Tool-Based Retrieval for Frame Selection in Long Video Understanding

arXiv:2610.08954v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) excel at diverse video-language tasks by reasoning over selected frames. However, frame selection for long video...

By Yiyang Huang, Yitian Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Jianglin Lu, Qihua Dong, Hailing Wang, Huimin Zeng, Mingyuan Zhang, Yun Fu
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

From Global Alignment to Local Grounding: Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition with Radical Verification

arXiv:2610.09449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Chinese character recognition (ZS-CCR) aims to recognize characters whose categories are never observed during training, and typically relies...

By Yu-Heng Shih, Bing-Chen Wu, Tsz-To Wong, Ting-En Yen, Hong-Han Shuai, Bin-Hua Hsieh, Chien-An Chen, Yi-Ren Yeh, Ching-Chun Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

ORCA: Hunting Compositional Failures in Text-to-Image Diffusion

ORCA (Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment) is a method that improves text-to-image diffusion models by aligning the diffusion transformer’s latent space with a low‑rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder. It introduces an auxiliary loss that uses a predictor with an orthogonal basis parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, providing a prompt‑dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. Experiments on three diffusion‑transformer backbones show that ORCA improves FID and GenEval scores, especially on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi‑object prompts, without adding inference‑time cost.

By Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Amitis Shidani, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Hesam Asadollahzadeh, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Mohammad Lotfollahi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

HySPE: Positional Encoding via Symplectic Dual Shears

HySPE introduces a hyperbolic symplectic positional encoding that uses dual shears to create a conformally symplectic contraction with two spectral decay rates per channel pair. It eliminates exponential drift by diagonalizing the operator and applying blockwise coordinate rebasing, ensuring length‑independent numerical bounds while matching the forward latency of RoPE. Experiments on TinyShakespeare and a 51M‑parameter Transformer show HySPE maintains stable perplexity at long sequence lengths, outperforming RoPE in extrapolation scenarios.

By Zhongping Ji
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Out-of-Air Computation: Enabling Structured Function Extraction from Wireless Superposition

The paper introduces AirCPU, an extraction‑oriented approach to over‑the‑air computation that uses joint source‑channel coding and a multi‑layer nested lattice architecture to create a structured wireless superposition. Unlike traditional embedding‑oriented designs, AirCPU operates directly on continuous device data, avoiding separate quantization and enabling progressive resolution through hierarchically scaled components transmitted over a bounded digital constellation. The authors formalize decoupled resolution, showing that with low decoding error probability, channel noise and constellation limits have negligible distortion, and they extend the method to fading MACs with collective, successive, and direct computation mechanisms to broaden the reliable operating regime.

By Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

EngramEdit: Decoupled Knowledge Updates in LLMs through Conditional Memory

EngramEdit introduces a method for decoupled knowledge updates in large language models using conditional memory architectures. By computing target memory representations that align with updated facts across multiple expressions, it jointly adjusts shared n‑gram embeddings while penalizing frequent ones to preserve unrelated knowledge. Experiments demonstrate near‑perfect editing success, improved multi‑hop reasoning, and strong performance under chain‑of‑thought prompting, all while maintaining general capabilities.

By Hongru Cai, Ran Wei, Wenjie Wang, Chengfa Wu, Ning Song, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li