Retrieval-augmented generation

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

6,183 stories · RSS feed

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Baseline Shape Decides the Verdict: A Controlled Re-Examination of Ternary Language Models at 60K Parameters

The study re‑examines a reported advantage of a routed ternary (1.58‑bit) language model over a full‑precision transformer at 60K parameters. By running controlled experiments with multiple seeds and a fixed training recipe, the authors find that the apparent benefit largely stems from the choice of baseline model shape rather than the ternary architecture itself. While the routed model does outperform other shapes at a larger 130M‑byte budget, its advantage diminishes when a plain gated diagonal‑SSM block is used, and the ternary penalty varies with architecture and quantization details.

By Gautam Veldanda
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control

AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.

By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Stochastic Semantic Evidence Graphs: Uncertainty Propagation and Governance for Agentic AI

The paper introduces Stochastic Semantic Evidence Graphs (SSEGs), a hierarchical stochastic directed acyclic graph that models uncertainty in AI-agent workflows, from evidence and retrieval to generation and decision mapping. SSEGs expand language nodes into autoregressive token subgraphs, optionally apply semantic reduction and calibration, and preserve uncertain claim–passage relations while propagating Fréchet bounds. The authors derive pathwise error bounds, use nodewise terms to trigger governance checks, and demonstrate through experiments that SSEGs can detect and quantify where uncertainty enters and propagates in AI outputs.

By Matthew Francis Dixon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

ARGUS: Role-Aware Event Knowledge Graphs for U.S. Employment-Discrimination Complaints

ARGUS is a pipeline that builds document-level Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) from U.S. employment‑discrimination complaints. It uses a 5W1H-inspired schema, legal-domain models, and LLM‑based structured generation to extract fact‑bearing statements, create chunk‑level event graphs with participant, temporal, and causal structure, and merge them into comprehensive document representations. Evaluation shows that graph‑structured classifiers outperform raw and linearized baselines on claim classification, and EKG‑only retrieval improves document‑scoped QA, though overall open‑retrieval gains are limited by low first‑stage candidate recall.

By Sriram Kannan, Swetha Saseendran, Vishnu Vardhan Reddy Kandi, Leslie Barrett, Madhavan Seshadri, Enrico Santus
arXiv AI
Sep 25

A Manifold-Aware Topic Modeling Approach via Rank-Based Prototypes

The paper introduces MARETopic, a training‑free framework that identifies topics by selecting rank‑based prototype documents from pretrained embeddings. By projecting embeddings onto a low‑dimensional manifold and building ranked neighborhood lists, a greedy algorithm picks exactly K exemplar texts whose neighborhoods cover the corpus. Two variants—MARETopic_Corr, which uses a query‑performance predictor and rank correlation, and MARETopic_Diff, which employs a rank‑based diffusion matrix—achieve higher purity and NMI on benchmark datasets and run significantly faster, while also improving topic coherence and vocabulary diversity through a novel Maximal Marginal Relevance step.

By Thiago C\'esar Castilho Almeida, Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette
arXiv AI
Sep 25

An auditable conditional-strategy framework for open-ended decision-making in complex lung cancer

The article introduces MedGPT Clinical Explorer (MCE), a conditional‑strategy framework designed to aid complex lung cancer decision‑making by explicitly mapping patient conditions to pathway eligibility, deferral, and redirection. In a study with 250 physicians across 98 institutions, MCE‑assisted strategies achieved higher Admissible Pathway Attainment Scores (APAS) than unaided or retrieval‑reference approaches, indicating more comprehensive inclusion of clinically relevant content and coherent links among pathways, conditions, and actions. The authors suggest that MCE’s shared decision object could improve transparency of omissions and contingencies, warranting prospective evaluation of its impact on workflow and patient outcomes.

By Daoyun Wang, Zhicheng Huang, Huaiyuan Sun, Jiaqi Xu, Xiaowei Xu, Zhibo Zheng, Zhongxing Bing, Yuxiao Lin, Yicheng Liang, Chao Gao, Bowen Xue, Kai Zhang, Song Xu, Wanpu Yan, Hui Xia, Lin Li, Xiang Yan, Mu Hu, Qianli Ma, Zhiqiang Xue, Xiaofang Liu, Zhihai Han, Nan Zhang, Chuanhao Tang, Tongmei Zhang, Lan Song, Zhaohui Zhu, Xuan Zeng, Shafei Wu, Hui Guan, Lei Deng, Huaxia Yang, Zeliang Lian, Wubin Sun, Yongxin Wang, Xiaohui Shen, Binlin Wang, Tiantian Gu, Yu Cui, Li Zhang, Shirui Wang, Naixin Liang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Frame-to-Panorama Localization and Context-Aware Sampling for Scene-Specific Ship Detection in a Smart Marina Testbed

The paper introduces a pipeline that localizes frames from historical PTZ maritime video onto a reference panorama and uses context-aware sampling to build compact, scene‑specific training sets for ship detection. By enriching frames with weather and solar metadata and applying diversity sampling, the method reduces 40,718 candidate frames to just 220 for annotation, achieving a 99.5% reduction. Fine‑tuned YOLOv26‑m on this curated subset attains high detection performance (AP50 ≈ 94.8% and AP50‑95 ≈ 75.1%).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Domain Recentering and Confidence-Weighted Prior Calibration for Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Domain Recentering with Confidence Calibration (DRC), a training‑free technique that adapts CLIP to unlabeled target images by fitting a Gaussian mixture and applying posterior‑weighted mean subtraction, followed by a log‑prior correction based on confidence‑weighted predictions. DRC improves cross‑domain accuracy, surpassing zero‑shot CLIP by 4.13 and 5.07 points on ViT‑B/16 and ResNet‑50, and maintains gains under ImageNet distribution shifts.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text

ASCIIBench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on generating and classifying ASCII-text images, using a dataset of 5,315 labeled ASCII images. The authors also release a fine‑tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure for evaluation. Their analysis shows that cosine similarity on CLIP embeddings fails to separate most categories, indicating a representation bottleneck rather than generational variance.

By Kerry Luo, Michael Fu, Joshua Peguero, Husnain Malik, Anvay Patil, Joyce Lin, Megan Van Overborg, Ryan Sarmiento, Kevin Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

PHONOS: PHOnetic Neutralization for Online Streaming Applications

PHONOS is a real‑time streaming module for speaker anonymization that neutralizes accent cues by converting non‑native segmental realizations toward a target accent domain. It uses pre‑generated golden utterances that preserve timbre and rhythm, aligning them with silence‑aware DTW and applying zero‑shot voice conversion to supervise a causal accent translator. The system achieves an 81% reduction in non‑native accent confidence, improves accentedness ratings, reduces speaker linkability in embedding space, and operates with ≤241 ms end‑to‑end latency on a single GPU.

By Waris Quamer, Mu-Ruei Tseng, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

LiSeCo: Linear Semantic Control for Language Generation

LiSeCo is a lightweight, gradient‑free method that controls language generation by directly intervening on the hidden activations of a token in embedding space. It uses control‑theoretic techniques to steer the generation trajectory away from undesired semantic regions and into a predefined allowed region, ensuring fine‑grained attribute control. The approach is computationally efficient, minimally impacts generation time, and is shown to be effective on tasks such as toxicity, sentiment, and bilingual language steering while preserving text quality.

By Emily Cheng, Carmen Amo Alonso
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

HIVE: Hidden-Evidence Verification for Hallucination Detection in Diffusion Large Language Models

The paper introduces HIVE, a method for detecting hallucinations in diffusion large language models by leveraging hidden trajectory evidence. HIVE compresses hidden states, selects informative step-layer evidence, and uses continuous prefix embeddings to condition a verifier that outputs a hallucination score and diagnostics. Experiments on two diffusion LLMs and three QA benchmarks show that HIVE outperforms eight baselines and improves AUROC and AUPRC by several points over text-only verification.

By Guoshenghui Zhao, Tan Yu, Weijie Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

MetaHOPE: A Metaphor-Oriented Evaluation Framework for Analysing MT and LLM Translation Errors

MetaHOPE is an error‑severity‑aware annotation framework designed to evaluate how well machine translation (MT) and large language models (LLMs) translate metaphors. The authors applied MetaHOPE to three state‑of‑the‑art systems—GoogleMT, GPT5.4, and Hunyuan‑7b—using two human‑annotated metaphor corpora (VUAMC and PSUCMC) for English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English translation. They also produced a bilingual post‑edited gold reference, creating a new resource for metaphor translation research.

By Jiahui Liang, Lifeng Han
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

MINER: Multi-crop INference-time Enhancement for Rare-Object Retrieval with Frozen Dual Encoders

MINER is a training‑free inference framework that enhances frozen dual‑encoder models for text‑to‑image retrieval when queries refer to small, visually subordinate objects in cluttered scenes. It augments the global image embedding with a bank of region‑level embeddings and applies hubness‑correcting similarity rescoring, thereby recovering visual evidence that global pooling underweights. The authors introduce ROCS, a benchmark derived from Flickr30K and MS COCO, and demonstrate that MINER improves retrieval performance across CLIP, SigLIP, and SigLIP 2 backbones on both ROCS and standard splits, attributing gains mainly to broader spatial coverage rather than precise crop placement.

By Abdulmalik Alquwayfili, Faisal AlMeshal, Jumanah Almajnouni, Huda Abdulhadi Alamri, Muhammad Kamran J Khan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.

By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

A Unified Framework and Dataset for Oriented Object Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing

The paper introduces O$^2$-VG, a unified framework for oriented object visual grounding in remote sensing images, comprising three complementary models: O$^2$-VG-Trans, a cross‑modality transformer; O$^2$-VG-Uni, which predicts universal oriented proposals; and O$^2$-VG-VLM, an autoregressive vision‑language model that generates oriented bounding boxes. It also presents DIOR‑R‑SVG, a new dataset containing image, expression, and oriented box triplets for training and evaluation. The framework demonstrates superior performance across multiple benchmarks and is supported by publicly available code.

By Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Jiaqi Zhao, Wen-Liang Du, Xixi Li, Hancheng Zhu, Rui Yao, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VLM2GeoVec: Toward Universal Multimodal Embeddings for Remote Sensing

The paper introduces RSMEB, a unified benchmark for remote‑sensing multimodal retrieval that evaluates both cross‑modal and interleaved retrieval across 21 tasks under a single ranking protocol. It also presents VLM2GeoVec, an instruction‑conditioned single‑encoder model that embeds image, text, bounding‑box, and geo‑coordinate tokens into one sequence and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on region‑caption, referring‑expression, and semantic geo‑aware retrieval while remaining competitive on conventional tasks. The authors provide code, checkpoints, and data on GitHub to facilitate reproducibility.

By Emanuel S\'anchez Aimar, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yonghao Xu, Michael Felsberg
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

When Learned Context Planning Fails to Beat Strong Retrieval: A Controlled Study of Planning, Routing, and Reranking for Long-Context QA

The study evaluates whether learned context planning can outperform strong retrieval methods in long-context multiple-choice question answering. Using 503 LongBench-v2 MCQ questions and a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model, the planner—trained on outcome-selected traces—achieves lower accuracy than anchored hybrid retrieval and BM25 across various character budgets. Even with tight budgets, the planner only marginally improves or matches retrieval, indicating that learned planning provides a weak relevance signal rather than a replacement for robust retrieval.

By Yingrui Li, Han Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

LEGO: Synergizing Expert GraphRAG and Expert Chain-of-Thought for Legal Reasoning

LEGO is a dual‑module framework that combines a Legal Expert GraphRAG system with an expert Chain‑of‑Thought approach to enhance complex legal reasoning. The GraphRAG component uses an expert‑annotated civil code graph and a greedy normative‑coverage retrieval algorithm to extract relevant provision subgraphs, while the Chain‑of‑Thought module structures retrieved provisions and case facts into a Provision‑Fact‑Conclusion reasoning flow. Using a Qwen3‑8B backbone, LEGO achieves 40.53% exact‑match accuracy on LawExamQA_Civil, surpassing baseline RAG and CoT models and matching larger models on multi‑hop and open‑ended benchmarks, with ablation studies confirming the complementary benefits of both modules.

By Qingjing Chen, Junkai Zhang, Shaochun Wang, Jiahao Ding, Siyuan Zheng, Yukun Yan, Zhi Zheng, Antonino Rotolo, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen