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
Sep 23

MIND the Gap: A Geographic Implicit Neural Representation with Adjustable Spatial Scale

The paper introduces MIND, a method that distills specialist geospatial model embeddings into a single generalist coordinate embedding with adjustable spatial granularity, using nested supervision across multiple embedding dimensions. MIND’s design allows downstream predictors to use only leading chunks or apply a Chunked Penalty to downweight finer details without retraining the INR. The authors evaluate MIND on CoordBench, a large INR benchmark of 52 datasets and 78 targets, and report that MIND and its Chunked Penalty variant achieve the highest regression and classification scores, especially under regional holdout, establishing a new state‑of‑the‑art for geographic implicit neural representations.

By Isaac Corley, Arjun Rao, Esther Rolf, Konstantin Klemmer, Evan Shelhamer, Nils Lehmann, Marc Ru{\ss}wurm, Gengchen Mai, Nathan Jacobs, Hannah Kerner
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Optimizing Denoising Trajectories in dLLMs: A Lightweight Evolutionary Heuristic Approach

The paper introduces a lightweight evolutionary heuristic scheduler for Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) that optimizes denoising trajectories using CMA-ES. It addresses failure modes of existing confidence-based schedulers—EOS Overflow and Proximal Bias—by integrating multiple heuristic features with a contextual mean-field embedding, requiring only 393 trainable parameters. Evaluations on LLaDA and Dream across reasoning and planning benchmarks show consistent outperformance over strong baselines and recent state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Zijian Zhao, Dian Jin, Xialiang Tong, Sen Li, Mingxuan Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Foundation model embeddings capture pre-diagnostic changes on screening mammograms

The study examined whether embeddings from four foundation models—Mammo-CLIP, HOPPR, MedImageInsight, and BiomedCLIP—could detect pre‑diagnostic changes in screening mammograms. Using 1,773 biopsied women and matched controls, the researchers measured the speed of movement along a data‑derived “cancer direction” in embedding space over successive screening intervals. They found that embeddings from clinically grounded models (Mammo‑CLIP, HOPPR, MedImageInsight) showed faster drift in malignant cases compared to controls, while the general biomedical model BiomedCLIP did not, indicating that foundation model embeddings can encode early tissue changes without task‑specific fine‑tuning.

By Kalina P. Slavkova, Eric Brattain, Aditya Gowd, Akash Pattnaik, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Matthew Morgan, Julie Bauml, Javid Abderezaei, Khan Siddiqui
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Transport-Coupled Bayesian Flows for Molecular Graph Generation

Transport-Coupled Bayesian Flows for Molecular Graph Generation (TopBF) addresses a key mismatch in existing diffusion models for molecular graph generation by eliminating the need for hard discretization during sampling. The framework generates graphs directly in continuous parameter distributions, learns graph topology via a Quasi-Wasserstein optimal‑transport coupling with geodesic costs, and enables property‑conditioned generation without retraining. Experiments on QM9 and ZINC250k show that TopBF achieves higher structural fidelity and more efficient generation compared to prior methods.

By Yida Xiong, Jiameng Chen, Kun Li, Hongzhi Zhang, Xiantao Cai, Lei Lei, Wenbin Hu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

A Computational Approach to Measuring Semantic Change in Sanskrit Literature

The paper evaluates whether diachronic word embeddings can track semantic change in Sanskrit, an ancient low‑resource language with complex phonological and morphological features. A 2.7‑million‑token corpus covering four canonical periods is processed with a neural sandhi splitter and lemmatizer, and per‑period embeddings are trained. Validation against a curated set of 21 historical shifts shows that 19 shifts align with philological expectations, supporting the method’s applicability to Sanskrit.

By Tanay Agrawal
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ABAI at COLIEE 2026 Task 1: Multi-Stage Retrieval with GraphRAG-Enhanced Meta-Learning, and a Post-Hoc Study of the Cross-Validation-to-Test Gap

The paper reports the ABAI submission to COLIEE 2026 Task 1, a case law retrieval challenge that suppresses cited passages, and details a four‑stage retrieval pipeline: multi‑view BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, neural reranking, graph‑based features via a graph attention network, and a LightGBM meta‑learner over 34 features. The best run achieved an F1 score of 0.177 on the official test set, compared to a cross‑validated 0.311, and the authors attribute the gap to a recall ceiling, temporal distribution shift, and threshold miscalibration. A controlled post‑hoc study examined the impact of threshold transfer, decision quality across time, and query similarity, and identified specific remedies—such as BM25 length‑normalisation tuning, event‑triple views, and dense fusion—that improved recall, while other interventions had no effect.

By Minhan Cho, Soyoung Park, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

DA-Cramming: Enhancing Cost-Effective Language Model Pretraining with Dependency Agreement Integration

The paper introduces DA-Cramming, a cost‑effective pretraining method that incorporates dependency agreement information into BERT‑style language models. It builds on the Cramming technique to enable training with a single GPU in a day, using a dual‑stage workflow and four submodels to embed chunk‑level dependency agreements. Experiments show that this approach outperforms prior methods on a range of tasks.

By Martin Kuo, Jianyi Zhang, Dongting Li, Yiran Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Geometric Uncertainty for Detecting and Correcting Hallucinations in LLMs

The paper presents a geometric framework for quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) at both the prompt and answer levels. By modeling a prompt-conditioned semantic distribution in answer embedding space and using archetypal analysis on multiple sampled answers, the method estimates distribution entropy for prompt-level uncertainty and atypicality for individual answer reliability. Experiments demonstrate comparable or superior performance to existing techniques on short-form QA datasets and notably better results on medical datasets where hallucinations pose critical risks.

By Edward Phillips, Sean Wu, Soheila Molaei, Danielle Belgrave, Anshul Thakur, David Clifton
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

CausalEmbed: Auto-Regressive Multi-Vector Generation in Latent Space for Visual Document Embedding

CausalEmbed is an auto‑regressive method for generating compact multi‑vector embeddings in visual document retrieval. By using iterative margin loss during contrastive training, it reduces the number of visual tokens needed by 30‑155× while keeping performance competitive across different backbones and benchmarks. The approach offers efficient training, scalable test‑time performance, and a flexible scaling strategy for multi‑vector representations.

By Jiahao Huo, Yu Huang, Yibo Yan, Ye Pan, Kening Zheng, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yi Cao, Mingdong Ou, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

ImIR: Image-Instruction Tuning for All-in-One Image Restoration

The paper introduces ImIR, a method that tunes a large pretrained image‑editing model for all‑in‑one image restoration by replacing text prompts with continuous image‑derived instructions. The approach uses a lightweight token mapper to shift the degraded image’s vision‑language embedding toward that of a clean image, enabling a single adapter to handle six restoration tasks in about three hours on one GPU. ImIR outperforms text conditioning in matched comparisons and supports task‑agnostic restoration without requiring a degradation label.

By S\"uleyman Aslan, G\"orkay Aydemir, M{\i}sra Yavuz, Yunus Bilge Kurt, Nasrin Rahimi, Ahmet Rasim Emirda\u{g}{\i}, Burak Can Biner, M. Ak{\i}n Y{\i}lmaz
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Hi-OPD: Hierarchy-Aware Open-Prompt Detection for Remote Sensing Images

Hi-OPD introduces a hierarchy‑aware open‑prompt detector for remote sensing images, addressing inconsistencies that arise when flat open‑prompt training fails to maintain descendant retrieval under ancestor queries. Using a large RS153‑HierOPD dataset with 175,644 images and 3.48M boxes mapped to 153 atomic categories, Hi‑OPD employs hierarchy‑safe negative sampling, path multi‑positive supervision, and one‑way upward consistency to learn ancestor retrieval. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art AP50 scores on DIOR and DOTA‑v2.0, significantly improves parent and grandparent AP50 metrics, and attains near‑perfect CAR50 across multiple sources.

By Jinlong Hu, Yi Zhang, Zhiqi Xia, Yikang Zhou, Shunping Ji
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Identity-Centric Video Summarization via Hierarchical Fusion of Biometric, Appearance, and 3D Body Features

The paper introduces a video summarization method that fuses facial embeddings, 3D body‑shape features, and visual appearance within a multi‑object tracking framework. By hierarchically assigning identities and using bidirectional anchoring, it robustly recovers trajectories even under heavy occlusion or low visual quality. Keyframes are selected through a multi‑factor weighting scheme that balances biometric clarity, social interaction, and motion dynamics, while Adaptive Non‑Maximum Suppression guarantees temporal diversity, resulting in a compact, identity‑centric summary.

By Milad Mirjalili, Enrique Alegre Guti\'errez, Eduardo Fidalgo Fern\'andez, V\'ictor Gonz\'alez Castro, Roc\'io Alaiz Rodr\'iguez, Manuel Castej\'on Limas