Information Retrieval
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- [1] arXiv:2506.00037 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Query Drift Compensation: Enabling Compatibility in Continual Learning of Retrieval Embedding ModelsComments: Accepted at CoLLAs 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Text embedding models enable semantic search, powering several NLP applications like Retrieval Augmented Generation by efficient information retrieval (IR). However, text embedding models are commonly studied in scenarios where the training data is static, thus limiting its applications to dynamic scenarios where new training data emerges over time. IR methods generally encode a huge corpus of documents to low-dimensional embeddings and store them in a database index. During retrieval, a semantic search over the corpus is performed and the document whose embedding is most similar to the query embedding is returned. When updating an embedding model with new training data, using the already indexed corpus is suboptimal due to the non-compatibility issue, since the model which was used to obtain the embeddings of the corpus has changed. While re-indexing of old corpus documents using the updated model enables compatibility, it requires much higher computation and time. Thus, it is critical to study how the already indexed corpus can still be effectively used without the need of re-indexing. In this work, we establish a continual learning benchmark with large-scale datasets and continually train dense retrieval embedding models on query-document pairs from new datasets in each task and observe forgetting on old tasks due to significant drift of embeddings. We employ embedding distillation on both query and document embeddings to maintain stability and propose a novel query drift compensation method during retrieval to project new model query embeddings to the old embedding space. This enables compatibility with previously indexed corpus embeddings extracted using the old model and thus reduces the forgetting. We show that the proposed method significantly improves performance without any re-indexing. Code is available at this https URL.
- [2] arXiv:2506.00041 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Decoding Dense Embeddings: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpreting and Discretizing Dense RetrievalSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Despite their strong performance, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models suffer from a lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel interpretability framework that leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose previously uninterpretable dense embeddings from DPR models into distinct, interpretable latent concepts. We generate natural language descriptions for each latent concept, enabling human interpretations of both the dense embeddings and the query-document similarity scores of DPR models. We further introduce Concept-Level Sparse Retrieval (CL-SR), a retrieval framework that directly utilizes the extracted latent concepts as indexing units. CL-SR effectively combines the semantic expressiveness of dense embeddings with the transparency and efficiency of sparse representations. We show that CL-SR achieves high index-space and computational efficiency while maintaining robust performance across vocabulary and semantic mismatches.
- [3] arXiv:2506.00048 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Graph Contrastive Learning for Optimizing Sparse Data in Recommender Systems with LightGCLComments: Term Paper, Machine Learning with Graphs, North Carolina State UniversitySubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for recommendation systems, but they often struggle under data sparsity and noise. To address these issues, we implemented LightGCL, a graph contrastive learning model that uses Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for robust graph augmentation, preserving semantic integrity without relying on stochastic or heuristic perturbations. LightGCL enables structural refinement and captures global collaborative signals, achieving significant gains over state-of-the-art models across benchmark datasets. Our experiments also demonstrate improved fairness and resilience to popularity bias, making it well-suited for real-world recommender systems.
- [4] arXiv:2506.00049 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Rethinking Hybrid Retrieval: When Small Embeddings and LLM Re-ranking Beat Bigger ModelsSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
This paper presents a comparison of embedding models in tri-modal hybrid retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. We investigate the fusion of dense semantic, sparse lexical, and graph-based embeddings, focusing on the performance of the MiniLM-v6 and BGE-Large architectures. Contrary to conventional assumptions, our results show that the compact MiniLM-v6 outperforms the larger BGE-Large when integrated with LLM-based re-ranking within our tri-modal hybrid framework. Experiments conducted on the SciFact, FIQA, and NFCorpus datasets demonstrate significant improvements in retrieval quality with the MiniLM-v6 configuration. The performance difference is particularly pronounced in agentic re-ranking scenarios, indicating better alignment between MiniLM-v6's embedding space and LLM reasoning. Our findings suggest that embedding model selection for RAG systems should prioritize compatibility with multi-signal fusion and LLM alignment, rather than relying solely on larger models. This approach may reduce computational requirements while improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency.
- [5] arXiv:2506.00054 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Enhancements, and Robustness FrontiersSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to enhance large language models (LLMs) by conditioning generation on external evidence retrieved at inference time. While RAG addresses critical limitations of parametric knowledge storage-such as factual inconsistency and domain inflexibility-it introduces new challenges in retrieval quality, grounding fidelity, pipeline efficiency, and robustness against noisy or adversarial inputs. This survey provides a comprehensive synthesis of recent advances in RAG systems, offering a taxonomy that categorizes architectures into retriever-centric, generator-centric, hybrid, and robustness-oriented designs. We systematically analyze enhancements across retrieval optimization, context filtering, decoding control, and efficiency improvements, supported by comparative performance analyses on short-form and multi-hop question answering tasks. Furthermore, we review state-of-the-art evaluation frameworks and benchmarks, highlighting trends in retrieval-aware evaluation, robustness testing, and federated retrieval settings. Our analysis reveals recurring trade-offs between retrieval precision and generation flexibility, efficiency and faithfulness, and modularity and coordination. We conclude by identifying open challenges and future research directions, including adaptive retrieval architectures, real-time retrieval integration, structured reasoning over multi-hop evidence, and privacy-preserving retrieval mechanisms. This survey aims to consolidate current knowledge in RAG research and serve as a foundation for the next generation of retrieval-augmented language modeling systems.
- [6] arXiv:2506.00107 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Gated Multimodal Graph Learning for Personalized RecommendationSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Multimodal recommendation has emerged as a promising solution to alleviate the cold-start and sparsity problems in collaborative filtering by incorporating rich content information, such as product images and textual descriptions. However, effectively integrating heterogeneous modalities into a unified recommendation framework remains a challenge. Existing approaches often rely on fixed fusion strategies or complex architectures , which may fail to adapt to modality quality variance or introduce unnecessary computational overhead.
In this work, we propose RLMultimodalRec, a lightweight and modular recommendation framework that combines graph-based user modeling with adaptive multimodal item encoding. The model employs a gated fusion module to dynamically balance the contribution of visual and textual modalities, enabling fine-grained and content-aware item representations. Meanwhile, a two-layer LightGCN encoder captures high-order collaborative signals by propagating embeddings over the user-item interaction graph without relying on nonlinear transformations.
We evaluate our model on a real-world dataset from the Amazon product domain. Experimental results demonstrate that RLMultimodalRec consistently outperforms several competitive baselines, including collaborative filtering, visual-aware, and multimodal GNN-based methods. The proposed approach achieves significant improvements in top-K recommendation metrics while maintaining scalability and interpretability, making it suitable for practical deployment. - [7] arXiv:2506.00220 [pdf, other]
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Title: Curate, Connect, Inquire: A System for Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) Human-Robot Centered DatasetsComments: 7 pages (excluding references), 8 pages (including references); 5 figures; accepted to the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Human-Centered Robot Learning in the Era of Big Data and Large ModelsSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Robotics (cs.RO)
The rapid growth of AI in robotics has amplified the need for high-quality, reusable datasets, particularly in human-robot interaction (HRI) and AI-embedded robotics. While more robotics datasets are being created, the landscape of open data in the field is uneven. This is due to a lack of curation standards and consistent publication practices, which makes it difficult to discover, access, and reuse robotics data. To address these challenges, this paper presents a curation and access system with two main contributions: (1) a structured methodology to curate, publish, and integrate FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) human-centered robotics datasets; and (2) a ChatGPT-powered conversational interface trained with the curated datasets metadata and documentation to enable exploration, comparison robotics datasets and data retrieval using natural language. Developed based on practical experience curating datasets from robotics labs within Texas Robotics at the University of Texas at Austin, the system demonstrates the value of standardized curation and persistent publication of robotics data. The system's evaluation suggests that access and understandability of human-robotics data are significantly improved. This work directly aligns with the goals of the HCRL @ ICRA 2025 workshop and represents a step towards more human-centered access to data for embodied AI.
- [8] arXiv:2506.00261 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: GPR: Empowering Generation with Graph-Pretrained RetrieverComments: Short paper submitted to EMNLP'25Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GRAG) places high demands on graph-specific retrievers. However, existing retrievers often rely on language models pretrained on plain text, limiting their effectiveness due to domain misalignment and structure ignorance. To address these challenges, we propose GPR, a graph-based retriever pretrained directly on knowledge graphs. GPR aligns natural language questions with relevant subgraphs through LLM-guided graph augmentation and employs a structure-aware objective to learn fine-grained retrieval strategies. Experiments on two datasets, three LLM backbones, and five baselines show that GPR consistently improves both retrieval quality and downstream generation, demonstrating its effectiveness as a robust retrieval solution for GRAG.
- [9] arXiv:2506.00314 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: FACE: A Fine-grained Reference Free Evaluator for Conversational Recommender SystemsSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
A systematic, reliable, and low-cost evaluation of Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) remains an open challenge. Existing automatic CRS evaluation methods are proven insufficient for evaluating the dynamic nature of recommendation conversations. This work proposes FACE: a Fine-grained, Aspect-based Conversation Evaluation method that provides evaluation scores for diverse turn and dialogue level qualities of recommendation conversations. FACE is reference-free and shows strong correlation with human judgments, achieving system correlation of 0.9 and turn/dialogue-level of 0.5, outperforming state-of-the-art CRS evaluation methods by a large margin. Additionally, unlike existing LLM-based methods that provide single uninterpretable scores, FACE provides insights into the system performance and enables identifying and locating problems within conversations.
- [10] arXiv:2506.00363 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Adapting General-Purpose Embedding Models to Private Datasets Using Keyword-based RetrievalComments: Link: this https URLSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Text embedding models play a cornerstone role in AI applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While general-purpose text embedding models demonstrate strong performance on generic retrieval benchmarks, their effectiveness diminishes when applied to private datasets (e.g., company-specific proprietary data), which often contain specialized terminology and lingo. In this work, we introduce BMEmbed, a novel method for adapting general-purpose text embedding models to private datasets. By leveraging the well-established keyword-based retrieval technique (BM25), we construct supervisory signals from the ranking of keyword-based retrieval results to facilitate model adaptation. We evaluate BMEmbed across a range of domains, datasets, and models, showing consistent improvements in retrieval performance. Moreover, we provide empirical insights into how BM25-based signals contribute to improving embeddings by fostering alignment and uniformity, highlighting the value of this approach in adapting models to domain-specific data. We release the source code available at this https URL for the research community.
- [11] arXiv:2506.00441 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: K-order Ranking Preference Optimization for Large Language ModelsSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
To adapt large language models (LLMs) to ranking tasks, existing list-wise methods, represented by list-wise Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), focus on optimizing partial-order or full-order list ranking consistency for LLMs to enhance their ranking abilities. However, we argue that optimizing top-K ranking consistency could be more appropriate for real-world applications. There are two main reasons: (1) users are typically concerned with only the top-K results, making top-K ranking more important, and (2) tail items often lack precise feedback, making top-K ranking more reliable. Based on this, we propose K-order Ranking Preference Optimization (KPO) by extending the DPO's Plackett-Luce model to accommodate top-K rankings. Additionally, recognizing that the number of important items can vary across queries, we extend KPO to dynamically determine appropriate K for different samples and introduce a curriculum learning strategy to boost training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of KPO, highlighting its high sample efficiency and robustness to noise. The code is available at this https URL.
- [12] arXiv:2506.00450 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: DV365: Extremely Long User History Modeling at InstagramWenhan Lyu, Devashish Tyagi, Yihang Yang, Ziwei Li, Ajay Somani, Karthikeyan Shanmugasundaram, Nikola Andrejevic, Ferdi Adeputra, Curtis Zeng, Arun K. Singh, Maxime Ransan, Sagar JainComments: SIGKDD 2025 acceptedSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Long user history is highly valuable signal for recommendation systems, but effectively incorporating it often comes with high cost in terms of data center power consumption and GPU. In this work, we chose offline embedding over end-to-end sequence length optimization methods to enable extremely long user sequence modeling as a cost-effective solution, and propose a new user embedding learning strategy, multi-slicing and summarization, that generates highly generalizable user representation of user's long-term stable interest. History length we encoded in this embedding is up to 70,000 and on average 40,000. This embedding, named as DV365, is proven highly incremental on top of advanced attentive user sequence models deployed in Instagram. Produced by a single upstream foundational model, it is launched in 15 different models across Instagram and Threads with significant impact, and has been production battle-proven for >1 year since our first launch.
- [13] arXiv:2506.00491 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question AnsweringSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is usually integrated into large language models (LLMs) to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence. Whereas,conventional one-step retrieve-and-read methods are insufficient for multi-hop question answering, facing challenges of retrieval semantic mismatching and the high cost in handling interdependent subquestions. In this paper, we propose Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (Q-DREAM). Q-DREAM consists of three key modules: (1) the Question Decomposition Module (QDM), which decomposes multi-hop questions into fine-grained subquestions; (2) the Subquestion Dependency Optimizer Module (SDOM), which models the interdependent relations of subquestions for better understanding; and (3) the Dynamic Passage Retrieval Module (DPRM), which aligns subquestions with relevant passages by optimizing the semantic embeddings. Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that Q-DREAM significantly outperforms existing RAG methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Notably, Q-DREAM also improves retrieval efficiency while maintaining high accuracy compared with recent baselines.
- [14] arXiv:2506.00828 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation SystemSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
In a single-slot recommendation system, users are only exposed to one item at a time, and the system cannot collect user feedback on multiple items simultaneously. Therefore, only pointwise modeling solutions can be adopted, focusing solely on modeling the likelihood of clicks or conversions for items by users to learn user-item preferences, without the ability to capture the ranking information among different items directly. However, since user-side information is often much more abundant than item-side information, the model can quickly learn the differences in user intrinsic tendencies, which are independent of the items they are exposed to. This can cause these intrinsic tendencies to become a shortcut bias for the model, leading to insufficient mining of the most concerned user-item preferences. To solve this challenge, we introduce the Breaker model. Breaker integrates an auxiliary task of user representation clustering with a multi-tower structure for cluster-specific preference modeling. By clustering user representations, we ensure that users within each cluster exhibit similar characteristics, which increases the complexity of the pointwise recommendation task on the user side. This forces the multi-tower structure with cluster-driven parameter learning to better model user-item preferences, ultimately eliminating shortcut biases related to user intrinsic tendencies. In terms of training, we propose a delayed parameter update mechanism to enhance training stability and convergence, enabling end-to-end joint training of the auxiliary clustering and classification tasks. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses the baselines. It has already been deployed and is actively serving tens of millions of users daily on Meituan, one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for services.
- [15] arXiv:2506.00954 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: AliBoost: Ecological Boosting Framework in Alibaba PlatformQijie Shen, Yuanchen Bei, Zihong Huang, Jialin Zhu, Keqin Xu, Boya Du, Jiawei Tang, Yuning Jiang, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang, Hao ChenComments: 12 pages, 5 figures, accepted by KDD2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Maintaining a healthy ecosystem in billion-scale online platforms is challenging, as users naturally gravitate toward popular items, leaving cold and less-explored items behind. This ''rich-get-richer'' phenomenon hinders the growth of potentially valuable cold items and harms the platform's ecosystem. Existing cold-start models primarily focus on improving initial recommendation performance for cold items but fail to address users' natural preference for popular content. In this paper, we introduce AliBoost, Alibaba's ecological boosting framework, designed to complement user-oriented natural recommendations and foster a healthier ecosystem. AliBoost incorporates a tiered boosting structure and boosting principles to ensure high-potential items quickly gain exposure while minimizing disruption to low-potential items. To achieve this, we propose the Stacking Fine-Tuning Cold Predictor to enhance the foundation CTR model's performance on cold items for accurate CTR and potential prediction. AliBoost then employs an Item-oriented Bidding Boosting mechanism to deliver cold items to the most suitable users while balancing boosting speed with user-personalized preferences. Over the past six months, AliBoost has been deployed across Alibaba's mainstream platforms, successfully cold-starting over a billion new items and increasing both clicks and GMV of cold items by over 60% within 180 days. Extensive online analysis and A/B testing demonstrate the effectiveness of AliBoost in addressing ecological challenges, offering new insights into the design of billion-scale recommender systems.
- [16] arXiv:2506.00983 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Bridging the Gap: From Ad-hoc to Proactive Search in ConversationsComments: Accepted as a full paper at SIGIR 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Proactive search in conversations (PSC) aims to reduce user effort in formulating explicit queries by proactively retrieving useful relevant information given conversational context. Previous work in PSC either directly uses this context as input to off-the-shelf ad-hoc retrievers or further fine-tunes them on PSC data. However, ad-hoc retrievers are pre-trained on short and concise queries, while the PSC input is longer and noisier. This input mismatch between ad-hoc search and PSC limits retrieval quality. While fine-tuning on PSC data helps, its benefits remain constrained by this input gap. In this work, we propose Conv2Query, a novel conversation-to-query framework that adapts ad-hoc retrievers to PSC by bridging the input gap between ad-hoc search and PSC. Conv2Query maps conversational context into ad-hoc queries, which can either be used as input for off-the-shelf ad-hoc retrievers or for further fine-tuning on PSC data. Extensive experiments on two PSC datasets show that Conv2Query significantly improves ad-hoc retrievers' performance, both when used directly and after fine-tuning on PSC.
- [17] arXiv:2506.01063 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: AI4Contracts: LLM & RAG-Powered Encoding of Financial Derivative ContractsComments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tablesSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are reshaping how AI systems extract and organize information from unstructured text. A key challenge is designing AI methods that can incrementally extract, structure, and validate information while preserving hierarchical and contextual relationships. We introduce CDMizer, a template-driven, LLM, and RAG-based framework for structured text transformation. By leveraging depth-based retrieval and hierarchical generation, CDMizer ensures a controlled, modular process that aligns generated outputs with predefined schema. Its template-driven approach guarantees syntactic correctness, schema adherence, and improved scalability, addressing key limitations of direct generation methods. Additionally, we propose an LLM-powered evaluation framework to assess the completeness and accuracy of structured representations. Demonstrated in the transformation of Over-the-Counter (OTC) financial derivative contracts into the Common Domain Model (CDM), CDMizer establishes a scalable foundation for AI-driven document understanding, structured synthesis, and automated validation in broader contexts.
- [18] arXiv:2506.01375 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Generative Next POI Recommendation with Semantic IDComments: 11 pages, 4 figures, the paper has been accepted by KDD 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation systems aim to predict the next destinations of user based on their preferences and historical check-ins. Existing generative POI recommendation methods usually employ random numeric IDs for POIs, limiting the ability to model semantic relationships between similar locations. In this paper, we propose Generative Next POI Recommendation with Semantic ID (GNPR-SID), an LLM-based POI recommendation model with a novel semantic POI ID (SID) representation method that enhances the semantic understanding of POI modeling. There are two key components in our GNPR-SID: (1) a Semantic ID Construction module that generates semantically rich POI IDs based on semantic and collaborative features, and (2) a Generative POI Recommendation module that fine-tunes LLMs to predict the next POI using these semantic IDs. By incorporating user interaction patterns and POI semantic features into the semantic ID generation, our method improves the recommendation accuracy and generalization of the model. To construct semantically related SIDs, we propose a POI quantization method based on residual quantized variational autoencoder, which maps POIs into a discrete semantic space. We also propose a diversity loss to ensure that SIDs are uniformly distributed across the semantic space. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that GNPR-SID substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 16% improvement in recommendation accuracy.
- [19] arXiv:2506.01673 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: GRAM: Generative Recommendation via Semantic-aware Multi-granular Late FusionComments: ACL 2025 (Main Conference)Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that leverages the extensive knowledge of large language models by formulating recommendations into a text-to-text generation task. However, existing studies face two key limitations in (i) incorporating implicit item relationships and (ii) utilizing rich yet lengthy item information. To address these challenges, we propose a Generative Recommender via semantic-Aware Multi-granular late fusion (GRAM), introducing two synergistic innovations. First, we design semantic-to-lexical translation to encode implicit hierarchical and collaborative item relationships into the vocabulary space of LLMs. Second, we present multi-granular late fusion to integrate rich semantics efficiently with minimal information loss. It employs separate encoders for multi-granular prompts, delaying the fusion until the decoding stage. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that GRAM outperforms eight state-of-the-art generative recommendation models, achieving significant improvements of 11.5-16.0% in Recall@5 and 5.3-13.6% in NDCG@5. The source code is available at this https URL.
- [20] arXiv:2506.01705 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: SPOT-Trip: Dual-Preference Driven Out-of-Town Trip RecommendationSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Out-of-town trip recommendation aims to generate a sequence of Points of Interest (POIs) for users traveling from their hometowns to previously unvisited regions based on personalized itineraries, e.g., origin, destination, and trip duration. Modeling the complex user preferences--which often exhibit a two-fold nature of static and dynamic interests--is critical for effective recommendations. However, the sparsity of out-of-town check-in data presents significant challenges in capturing such user preferences. Meanwhile, existing methods often conflate the static and dynamic preferences, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we for the first time systematically study the problem of out-of-town trip recommendation. A novel framework SPOT-Trip is proposed to explicitly learns the dual static-dynamic user preferences. Specifically, to handle scarce data, we construct a POI attribute knowledge graph to enrich the semantic modeling of users' hometown and out-of-town check-ins, enabling the static preference modeling through attribute relation-aware aggregation. Then, we employ neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to capture the continuous evolution of latent dynamic user preferences and innovatively combine a temporal point process to describe the instantaneous probability of each preference behavior. Further, a static-dynamic fusion module is proposed to merge the learned static and dynamic user preferences. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, showing that SPOT-Trip achieves performance improvement by up to 17.01%.
- [21] arXiv:2506.01877 [pdf, html, other]
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Title: When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIRDayoon Ko, Jinyoung Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Jinhyuk Kim, Jaehoon Lee, Seonghak Song, Minyoung Lee, Gunhee KimComments: ACL 2025 FindingsSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Dense retrievers encode texts into embeddings to efficiently retrieve relevant documents from large databases in response to user queries. However, real-world corpora continually evolve, leading to a shift from the original training distribution of the retriever. Without timely updates or retraining, indexing newly emerging documents can degrade retrieval performance for future queries. Thus, identifying when a dense retriever requires an update is critical for maintaining robust retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose a novel task of predicting whether a corpus is out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to a dense retriever before indexing. Addressing this task allows us to proactively manage retriever updates, preventing potential retrieval failures. We introduce GradNormIR, an unsupervised approach that leverages gradient norms to detect OOD corpora effectively. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that GradNormIR enables timely updates of dense retrievers in evolving document collections, significantly enhancing retrieval robustness and efficiency.
- [22] arXiv:2506.01910 [pdf, other]
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Title: GLoSS: Generative Language Models with Semantic Search for Sequential RecommendationComments: Our code and model checkpoints are publicly available at:this https URLSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
We propose Generative Low-rank language model with Semantic Search (GLoSS), a generative recommendation framework that combines large language models with dense retrieval for sequential recommendation. Unlike prior methods such as GPT4Rec, which rely on lexical matching via BM25, GLoSS uses semantic search to retrieve relevant items beyond lexical matching. For query generation, we employ 4-bit quantized LlaMA-3 models fine-tuned with low-rank adaptation (LoRA), enabling efficient training and inference on modest hardware. We evaluate GLoSS on three real-world Amazon review datasets: Beauty, Toys, and Sports, and find that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Compared to traditional ID-based baselines, GLoSS improves Recall@5 by 33.3%, 52.8%, and 15.2%, and NDCG@5 by 30.0%, 42.6%, and 16.1%, respectively. It also outperforms LLM-based recommenders such as P5, GPT4Rec, LlamaRec and E4SRec with Recall@5 gains of 4.3%, 22.8%, and 29.5%. Additionally, user segment evaluations show that GLoSS performs particularly well for cold-start users in the Amazon Toys and Sports datasets, and benefits from longer user histories in Amazon Beauty dataset, demonstrating robustness across different levels of interaction lengths.
New submissions (showing 22 of 22 entries)
- [23] arXiv:2506.00074 (cross-list from cs.CY) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Whose Name Comes Up? Auditing LLM-Based Scholar RecommendationsDaniele Barolo, Chiara Valentin, Fariba Karimi, Luis Galárraga, Gonzalo G. Méndez, Lisette Espín-NoboaComments: 39 pages: 10 main (incl. 9 figures), 3 references, and 26 appendix. Paper under-reviewSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
This paper evaluates the performance of six open-weight LLMs (llama3-8b, llama3.1-8b, gemma2-9b, mixtral-8x7b, llama3-70b, llama3.1-70b) in recommending experts in physics across five tasks: top-k experts by field, influential scientists by discipline, epoch, seniority, and scholar counterparts. The evaluation examines consistency, factuality, and biases related to gender, ethnicity, academic popularity, and scholar similarity. Using ground-truth data from the American Physical Society and OpenAlex, we establish scholarly benchmarks by comparing model outputs to real-world academic records. Our analysis reveals inconsistencies and biases across all models. mixtral-8x7b produces the most stable outputs, while llama3.1-70b shows the highest variability. Many models exhibit duplication, and some, particularly gemma2-9b and llama3.1-8b, struggle with formatting errors. LLMs generally recommend real scientists, but accuracy drops in field-, epoch-, and seniority-specific queries, consistently favoring senior scholars. Representation biases persist, replicating gender imbalances (reflecting male predominance), under-representing Asian scientists, and over-representing White scholars. Despite some diversity in institutional and collaboration networks, models favor highly cited and productive scholars, reinforcing the rich-getricher effect while offering limited geographical representation. These findings highlight the need to improve LLMs for more reliable and equitable scholarly recommendations.
- [24] arXiv:2506.00137 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: LaMP-QA: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Question AnsweringSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Personalization is essential for question answering systems that are user-centric. Despite its importance, personalization in answer generation has been relatively underexplored. This is mainly due to lack of resources for training and evaluating personalized question answering systems. We address this gap by introducing LaMP-QA -- a benchmark designed for evaluating personalized long-form answer generation. The benchmark covers questions from three major categories: (1) Arts & Entertainment, (2) Lifestyle & Personal Development, and (3) Society & Culture, encompassing over 45 subcategories in total. To assess the quality and potential impact of the LaMP-QA benchmark for personalized question answering, we conduct comprehensive human and automatic evaluations, to compare multiple evaluation strategies for evaluating generated personalized responses and measure their alignment with human preferences. Furthermore, we benchmark a number of non-personalized and personalized approaches based on open-source and proprietary large language models (LLMs). Our results show that incorporating the personalized context provided leads to performance improvements of up to 39%. The benchmark is publicly released to support future research in this area.
- [25] arXiv:2506.00203 (cross-list from cs.CY) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: The World As Large Language Models See It: Exploring the reliability of LLMs in representing geographical featuresComments: 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tablesSubjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, questions about their trustworthiness in delivering factual information have become increasingly important. This concern also applies to their ability to accurately represent the geographic world. With recent advancements in this field, it is relevant to consider whether and to what extent LLMs' representations of the geographical world can be trusted. This study evaluates the performance of GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash in three key geospatial tasks: geocoding, elevation estimation, and reverse geocoding. In the geocoding task, both models exhibited systematic and random errors in estimating the coordinates of St. Anne's Column in Innsbruck, Austria, with GPT-4o showing greater deviations and Gemini 2.0 Flash demonstrating more precision but a significant systematic offset. For elevation estimation, both models tended to underestimate elevations across Austria, though they captured overall topographical trends, and Gemini 2.0 Flash performed better in eastern regions. The reverse geocoding task, which involved identifying Austrian federal states from coordinates, revealed that Gemini 2.0 Flash outperformed GPT-4o in overall accuracy and F1-scores, demonstrating better consistency across regions. Despite these findings, neither model achieved an accurate reconstruction of Austria's federal states, highlighting persistent misclassifications. The study concludes that while LLMs can approximate geographic information, their accuracy and reliability are inconsistent, underscoring the need for fine-tuning with geographical information to enhance their utility in GIScience and Geoinformatics.
- [26] arXiv:2506.00238 (cross-list from cs.CV) [pdf, other]
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Title: ZeShot-VQA: Zero-Shot Visual Question Answering Framework with Answer Mapping for Natural Disaster Damage AssessmentComments: Accepted by the 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2025)Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Natural disasters usually affect vast areas and devastate infrastructures. Performing a timely and efficient response is crucial to minimize the impact on affected communities, and data-driven approaches are the best choice. Visual question answering (VQA) models help management teams to achieve in-depth understanding of damages. However, recently published models do not possess the ability to answer open-ended questions and only select the best answer among a predefined list of answers. If we want to ask questions with new additional possible answers that do not exist in the predefined list, the model needs to be fin-tuned/retrained on a new collected and annotated dataset, which is a time-consuming procedure. In recent years, large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have earned significant attention. These models are trained on extensive datasets and demonstrate strong performance on both unimodal and multimodal vision/language downstream tasks, often without the need for fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a VLM-based zero-shot VQA (ZeShot-VQA) method, and investigate the performance of on post-disaster FloodNet dataset. Since the proposed method takes advantage of zero-shot learning, it can be applied on new datasets without fine-tuning. In addition, ZeShot-VQA is able to process and generate answers that has been not seen during the training procedure, which demonstrates its flexibility.
- [27] arXiv:2506.00622 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Improving Dialogue State Tracking through Combinatorial Search for In-Context ExamplesSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
In dialogue state tracking (DST), in-context learning comprises a retriever that selects labeled dialogues as in-context examples and a DST model that uses these examples to infer the dialogue state of the query dialogue. Existing methods for constructing training data for retrievers suffer from three key limitations: (1) the synergistic effect of examples is not considered, (2) the linguistic characteristics of the query are not sufficiently factored in, and (3) scoring is not directly optimized for DST performance. Consequently, the retriever can fail to retrieve examples that would substantially improve DST performance. To address these issues, we present CombiSearch, a method that scores effective in-context examples based on their combinatorial impact on DST performance. Our evaluation on MultiWOZ shows that retrievers trained with CombiSearch surpass state-of-the-art models, achieving a 20x gain in data efficiency and generalizing well to the SGD dataset. Moreover, CombiSearch attains a 12% absolute improvement in the upper bound DST performance over traditional approaches when no retrieval errors are assumed. This significantly increases the headroom for practical DST performance while demonstrating that existing methods rely on suboptimal data for retriever training.
- [28] arXiv:2506.00723 (cross-list from cs.LG) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Pitfalls in Evaluating Language Model ForecastersComments: 20 pages, 8 figuresSubjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to forecasting tasks, with some works claiming these systems match or exceed human performance. In this paper, we argue that, as a community, we should be careful about such conclusions as evaluating LLM forecasters presents unique challenges. We identify two broad categories of issues: (1) difficulty in trusting evaluation results due to many forms of temporal leakage, and (2) difficulty in extrapolating from evaluation performance to real-world forecasting. Through systematic analysis and concrete examples from prior work, we demonstrate how evaluation flaws can raise concerns about current and future performance claims. We argue that more rigorous evaluation methodologies are needed to confidently assess the forecasting abilities of LLMs.
- [29] arXiv:2506.01308 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, other]
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Title: A Platform for Investigating Public Health Content with Efficient Concern ClassificationComments: 19 pages, 15 figuresSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
A recent rise in online content expressing concerns with public health initiatives has contributed to already stalled uptake of preemptive measures globally. Future public health efforts must attempt to understand such content, what concerns it may raise among readers, and how to effectively respond to it. To this end, we present ConcernScope, a platform that uses a teacher-student framework for knowledge transfer between large language models and light-weight classifiers to quickly and effectively identify the health concerns raised in a text corpus. The platform allows uploading massive files directly, automatically scraping specific URLs, and direct text editing. ConcernScope is built on top of a taxonomy of public health concerns. Intended for public health officials, we demonstrate several applications of this platform: guided data exploration to find useful examples of common concerns found in online community datasets, identification of trends in concerns through an example time series analysis of 186,000 samples, and finding trends in topic frequency before and after significant events.
- [30] arXiv:2506.01361 (cross-list from cs.LG) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: TimeGraph: Synthetic Benchmark Datasets for Robust Time-Series Causal DiscoveryComments: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted at KDD 2025 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track)Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
Robust causal discovery in time series datasets depends on reliable benchmark datasets with known ground-truth causal relationships. However, such datasets remain scarce, and existing synthetic alternatives often overlook critical temporal properties inherent in real-world data, including nonstationarity driven by trends and seasonality, irregular sampling intervals, and the presence of unobserved confounders. To address these challenges, we introduce TimeGraph, a comprehensive suite of synthetic time-series benchmark datasets that systematically incorporates both linear and nonlinear dependencies while modeling key temporal characteristics such as trends, seasonal effects, and heterogeneous noise patterns. Each dataset is accompanied by a fully specified causal graph featuring varying densities and diverse noise distributions and is provided in two versions: one including unobserved confounders and one without, thereby offering extensive coverage of real-world complexity while preserving methodological neutrality. We further demonstrate the utility of TimeGraph through systematic evaluations of state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms including PCMCI+, LPCMCI, and FGES across a diverse array of configurations and metrics. Our experiments reveal significant variations in algorithmic performance under realistic temporal conditions, underscoring the need for robust synthetic benchmarks in the fair and transparent assessment of causal discovery methods. The complete TimeGraph suite, including dataset generation scripts, evaluation metrics, and recommended experimental protocols, is freely available to facilitate reproducible research and foster community-driven advancements in time-series causal discovery.
- [31] arXiv:2506.01451 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, other]
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Title: Building Entity Association Mining Framework for Knowledge DiscoveryComments: Presented at Business Analytics and Intelligence Conference, IIM BengaluruSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Extracting useful signals or pattern to support important business decisions for example analyzing investment product traction and discovering customer preference, risk monitoring etc. from unstructured text is a challenging task. Capturing interaction of entities or concepts and association mining is a crucial component in text mining, enabling information extraction and reasoning over and knowledge discovery from text. Furthermore, it can be used to enrich or filter knowledge graphs to guide exploration processes, descriptive analytics and uncover hidden stories in the text. In this paper, we introduce a domain independent pipeline i.e., generalized framework to enable document filtering, entity extraction using various sources (or techniques) as plug-ins and association mining to build any text mining business use-case and quantitatively define a scoring metric for ranking purpose. The proposed framework has three major components a) Document filtering: filtering documents/text of interest from massive amount of texts b) Configurable entity extraction pipeline: include entity extraction techniques i.e., i) DBpedia Spotlight, ii) Spacy NER, iii) Custom Entity Matcher, iv) Phrase extraction (or dictionary) based c) Association Relationship Mining: To generates co-occurrence graph to analyse potential relationships among entities, concepts. Further, co-occurrence count based frequency statistics provide a holistic window to observe association trends or buzz rate in specific business context. The paper demonstrates the usage of framework as fundamental building box in two financial use-cases namely brand product discovery and vendor risk monitoring. We aim that such framework will remove duplicated effort, minimize the development effort, and encourage reusability and rapid prototyping in association mining business applications for institutions.
- [32] arXiv:2506.01488 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Argument-Centric Causal Intervention Method for Mitigating Bias in Cross-Document Event Coreference ResolutionSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Cross-document Event Coreference Resolution (CD-ECR) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) that seeks to determine whether event mentions across multiple documents refer to the same real-world occurrence. However, current CD-ECR approaches predominantly rely on trigger features within input mention pairs, which induce spurious correlations between surface-level lexical features and coreference relationships, impairing the overall performance of the models. To address this issue, we propose a novel cross-document event coreference resolution method based on Argument-Centric Causal Intervention (ACCI). Specifically, we construct a structural causal graph to uncover confounding dependencies between lexical triggers and coreference labels, and introduce backdoor-adjusted interventions to isolate the true causal effect of argument semantics. To further mitigate spurious correlations, ACCI integrates a counterfactual reasoning module that quantifies the causal influence of trigger word perturbations, and an argument-aware enhancement module to promote greater sensitivity to semantically grounded information. In contrast to prior methods that depend on costly data augmentation or heuristic-based filtering, ACCI enables effective debiasing in a unified end-to-end framework without altering the underlying training procedure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACCI achieves CoNLL F1 of 88.4% on ECB+ and 85.2% on GVC, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The implementation and materials are available at this https URL.
- [33] arXiv:2506.01659 (cross-list from cs.NE) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Engram Memory Encoding and Retrieval: A Neurocomputational PerspectiveComments: 18 pages, 7 figures, 3 tablesSubjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)
Despite substantial research into the biological basis of memory, the precise mechanisms by which experiences are encoded, stored, and retrieved in the brain remain incompletely understood. A growing body of evidence supports the engram theory, which posits that sparse populations of neurons undergo lasting physical and biochemical changes to support long-term memory. Yet, a comprehensive computational framework that integrates biological findings with mechanistic models remains elusive. This work synthesizes insights from cellular neuroscience and computational modeling to address key challenges in engram research: how engram neurons are identified and manipulated; how synaptic plasticity mechanisms contribute to stable memory traces; and how sparsity promotes efficient, interference-resistant representations. Relevant computational approaches -- such as sparse regularization, engram gating, and biologically inspired architectures like Sparse Distributed Memory and spiking neural networks -- are also examined. Together, these findings suggest that memory efficiency, capacity, and stability emerge from the interaction of plasticity and sparsity constraints. By integrating neurobiological and computational perspectives, this paper provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation for engram research and proposes a roadmap for future inquiry into the mechanisms underlying memory, with implications for the diagnosis and treatment of memory-related disorders.
- [34] arXiv:2506.01668 (cross-list from cs.MM) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Small Stickers, Big Meanings: A Multilingual Sticker Semantic Understanding Dataset with a Gamified ApproachSubjects: Multimedia (cs.MM); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Stickers, though small, are a highly condensed form of visual expression, ubiquitous across messaging platforms and embraced by diverse cultures, genders, and age groups. Despite their popularity, sticker retrieval remains an underexplored task due to the significant human effort and subjectivity involved in constructing high-quality sticker query datasets. Although large language models (LLMs) excel at general NLP tasks, they falter when confronted with the nuanced, intangible, and highly specific nature of sticker query generation.
To address this challenge, we propose a threefold solution. First, we introduce Sticktionary, a gamified annotation framework designed to gather diverse, high-quality, and contextually resonant sticker queries. Second, we present StickerQueries, a multilingual sticker query dataset containing 1,115 English and 615 Chinese queries, annotated by over 60 contributors across 60+ hours. Lastly, Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances query generation quality, retrieval accuracy, and semantic understanding in the sticker domain. To support future research, we publicly release our multilingual dataset along with two fine-tuned query generation models. - [35] arXiv:2506.01829 (cross-list from cs.CL) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: CiteEval: Principle-Driven Citation Evaluation for Source AttributionYumo Xu, Peng Qi, Jifan Chen, Kunlun Liu, Rujun Han, Lan Liu, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli, Arshit Gupta, Zhiguo WangComments: ACL 2025Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Citation quality is crucial in information-seeking systems, directly influencing trust and the effectiveness of information access. Current evaluation frameworks, both human and automatic, mainly rely on Natural Language Inference (NLI) to assess binary or ternary supportiveness from cited sources, which we argue is a suboptimal proxy for citation evaluation. In this work we introduce CiteEval, a citation evaluation framework driven by principles focusing on fine-grained citation assessment within a broad context, encompassing not only the cited sources but the full retrieval context, user query, and generated text. Guided by the proposed framework, we construct CiteBench, a multi-domain benchmark with high-quality human annotations on citation quality. To enable efficient evaluation, we further develop CiteEval-Auto, a suite of model-based metrics that exhibit strong correlation with human judgments. Experiments across diverse systems demonstrate CiteEval-Auto's superior ability to capture the multifaceted nature of citations compared to existing metrics, offering a principled and scalable approach to evaluate and improve model-generated citations.
- [36] arXiv:2506.01903 (cross-list from quant-ph) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Getting almost all the bits from a quantum random access codeHan-Hsuan Lin (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan), Ronald de Wolf (QuSoft, CWI and University of Amsterdam)Comments: 14 pages LaTeXSubjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
A quantum random access code (QRAC) is a map $x\mapsto\rho_x$ that encodes $n$-bit strings $x$ into $m$-qubit quantum states $\rho_x$, in a way that allows us to recover any one bit of $x$ with success probability $\geq p$. The measurement on $\rho_x$ that is used to recover, say, $x_1$ may destroy all the information about the other bits; this is in fact what happens in the well-known QRAC that encodes $n=2$ bits into $m=1$ qubits. Does this generalize to large $n$, i.e., could there exist QRACs that are so "obfuscated" that one cannot get much more than one bit out of them? Here we show that this is not the case: for every QRAC there exists a measurement that (with high probability) recovers the full $n$-bit string $x$ up to small Hamming distance, even for the worst-case $x$.
Cross submissions (showing 14 of 14 entries)
- [37] arXiv:2311.00388 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Towards Automatic Sampling of User Behaviors for Sequential Recommender SystemsComments: IJCAI 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Sequential recommender systems (SRS) have gained increasing popularity due to their remarkable proficiency in capturing dynamic user preferences. In the current setup of SRS, a common configuration is to uniformly consider each historical behavior as a positive interaction. However, this setting has the potential to yield sub-optimal performance as each individual item often have a different impact on shaping the user's interests. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel automatic sampling framework for sequential recommendation, named AutoSAM, to non-uniformly treat historical behaviors. Specifically, AutoSAM extends the conventional SRS framework by integrating an extra sampler to intelligently discern the skew distribution of the raw input, and then sample informative sub-sets to build more generalizable SRS. To tackle the challenges posed by non differentiable sampling actions and to introduce multiple decision factors for sampling, we further design a novel reinforcement learning based method to guide the training of the sampler. Furthermore, we theoretically devise multi-objective sampling rewards including \textit{Future Prediction} and \textit{Sequence Perplexity}, and then optimize the whole framework in an end-to-end manner by combining the policy gradient. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark recommendation models and four real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AutoSAM.
- [38] arXiv:2410.21801 (replaced) [pdf, other]
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Title: PerSRV: Personalized Sticker Retrieval with Vision-Language ModelComments: Accepted at WWW '25Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Instant Messaging is a popular means for daily communication, allowing users to send text and stickers. As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words", so developing an effective sticker retrieval technique is crucial for enhancing user experience. However, existing sticker retrieval methods rely on labeled data to interpret stickers, and general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to capture the unique semantics of stickers. Additionally, relevant-based sticker retrieval methods lack personalization, creating a gap between diverse user expectations and retrieval results. To address these, we propose the Personalized Sticker Retrieval with Vision-Language Model framework, namely PerSRV, structured into offline calculations and online processing modules. The online retrieval part follows the paradigm of relevant recall and personalized ranking, supported by the offline pre-calculation parts, which are sticker semantic understanding, utility evaluation and personalization modules. Firstly, for sticker-level semantic understanding, we supervised fine-tuned LLaVA-1.5-7B to generate human-like sticker semantics, complemented by textual content extracted from figures and historical interaction queries. Secondly, we investigate three crowd-sourcing metrics for sticker utility evaluation. Thirdly, we cluster style centroids based on users' historical interactions to achieve personal preference modeling. Finally, we evaluate our proposed PerSRV method on a public sticker retrieval dataset from WeChat, containing 543,098 candidates and 12,568 interactions. Experimental results show that PerSRV significantly outperforms existing methods in multi-modal sticker retrieval. Additionally, our fine-tuned VLM delivers notable improvements in sticker semantic understandings.
- [39] arXiv:2412.00639 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Needle: A Generative AI-Powered Multi-modal Database for Answering Complex Natural Language QueriesSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Databases (cs.DB)
Multi-modal datasets, like those involving images, often miss the detailed descriptions that properly capture the rich information encoded in each item. This makes answering complex natural language queries a major challenge in this domain. In particular, unlike the traditional nearest neighbor search, where the tuples and the query are represented as points in a single metric space, these settings involve queries and tuples embedded in fundamentally different spaces, making the traditional query answering methods inapplicable. Existing literature addresses this challenge for image datasets through vector representations jointly trained on natural language and images. This technique, however, underperforms for complex queries due to various reasons.
This paper takes a step towards addressing this challenge by introducing a Generative-based Monte Carlo method that utilizes foundation models to generate synthetic samples that capture the complexity of the natural language query and represent it in the same metric space as the multi-modal data.
Following this method, we propose Needle, a database for image data retrieval. Instead of relying on contrastive learning or metadata-searching approaches, our system is based on synthetic data generation to capture the complexities of natural language queries. Our system is open-source and ready for deployment, designed to be easily adopted by researchers and developers. The comprehensive experiments on various benchmark datasets verify that this system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-image retrieval methods in the literature. Any foundation model and embedder can be easily integrated into Needle to improve the performance, piggybacking on the advancements in these technologies. - [40] arXiv:2412.19302 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: RecLM: Recommendation Instruction TuningComments: This paper is accepted by ACL 2025 main conferenceSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Modern recommender systems aim to deeply understand users' complex preferences through their past interactions. While deep collaborative filtering approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at capturing user-item relationships, their effectiveness is limited when handling sparse data or zero-shot scenarios, primarily due to constraints in ID-based embedding functions. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic recommendation instruction-tuning paradigm that seamlessly integrates large language models with collaborative filtering. Our proposed $\underline{Rec}$ommendation $\underline{L}$anguage $\underline{M}$odel (RecLM) enhances the capture of user preference diversity through a carefully designed reinforcement learning reward function that facilitates self-augmentation of language models. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate significant advantages of our approach across various settings, and its plug-and-play compatibility with state-of-the-art recommender systems results in notable performance enhancements. The implementation of our RecLM framework is publicly available at: this https URL.
- [41] arXiv:2503.02614 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A SurveyYiyan Xu, Jinghao Zhang, Alireza Salemi, Xinting Hu, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Hamed Zamani, Xiangnan He, Tat-Seng ChuaComments: ACL 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
In the era of large models, content generation is gradually shifting to Personalized Generation (PGen), tailoring content to individual preferences and needs. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on PGen, investigating existing research in this rapidly growing field. We conceptualize PGen from a unified perspective, systematically formalizing its key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows. Based on this unified perspective, we propose a multi-level taxonomy, offering an in-depth review of technical advancements, commonly used datasets, and evaluation metrics across multiple modalities, personalized contexts, and tasks. Moreover, we envision the potential applications of PGen and highlight open challenges and promising directions for future exploration. By bridging PGen research across multiple modalities, this survey serves as a valuable resource for fostering knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration, ultimately contributing to a more personalized digital landscape.
- [42] arXiv:2505.07155 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Reassessing Large Language Model Boolean Query Generation for Systematic ReviewsComments: Accepted in SIGIR-2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Systematic reviews are comprehensive literature reviews that address highly focused research questions and represent the highest form of evidence in medicine. A critical step in this process is the development of complex Boolean queries to retrieve relevant literature. Given the difficulty of manually constructing these queries, recent efforts have explored Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in their formulation. One of the first studies,Wang et al., investigated ChatGPT for this task, followed by Staudinger et al., which evaluated multiple LLMs in a reproducibility study. However, the latter overlooked several key aspects of the original work, including (i) validation of generated queries, (ii) output formatting constraints, and (iii) selection of examples for chain-of-thought (Guided) prompting. As a result, its findings diverged significantly from the original study. In this work, we systematically reproduce both studies while addressing these overlooked factors. Our results show that query effectiveness varies significantly across models and prompt designs, with guided query formulation benefiting from well-chosen seed studies. Overall, prompt design and model selection are key drivers of successful query formulation. Our findings provide a clearer understanding of LLMs' potential in Boolean query generation and highlight the importance of model- and prompt-specific optimisations. The complex nature of systematic reviews adds to challenges in both developing and reproducing methods but also highlights the importance of reproducibility studies in this domain.
- [43] arXiv:2505.09795 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Beyond Pairwise Learning-To-Rank At AirbnbSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on the items for logical consistency. But here's the catch-no algorithm can achieve all three at the same time. We call this limitation the SAT theorem for ranking algorithms. Given the dilemma, how can we design a practical system that meets user needs? Our current work at Airbnb provides an answer, with a working solution deployed at scale. We start with pairwise learning-to-rank (LTR) models-the bedrock of search ranking tech stacks today. They scale linearly with the number of items ranked and perform strongly on metrics like NDCG by learning from pairwise comparisons. They are at a sweet spot of performance vs. cost, making them an ideal choice for several industrial applications. However, they have a drawback-by ignoring interactions between items, they compromise on accuracy. To improve accuracy, we create a "true" pairwise LTR model-one that captures interactions between items during pairwise comparisons. But accuracy comes at the expense of scalability and total order, and we discuss strategies to counter these challenges. For greater accuracy, we take each item in the search result, and compare it against the rest of the items along two dimensions: (1) Superiority: How strongly do searchers prefer the given item over the remaining ones? (2) Similarity: How similar is the given item to all the other items? This forms the basis of our "all-pairwise" LTR framework, which factors in interactions across all items at once. Looking at items on the search result page all together-superiority and similarity combined-gives us a deeper understanding of what searchers truly want. We quantify the resulting improvements in searcher experience through offline and online experiments at Airbnb.
- [44] arXiv:2505.17549 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: EGA-V2: An End-to-end Generative Framework for Industrial AdvertisingSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Traditional online industrial advertising systems suffer from the limitations of multi-stage cascaded architectures, which often discard high-potential candidates prematurely and distribute decision logic across disconnected modules. While recent generative recommendation approaches provide end-to-end solutions, they fail to address critical advertising requirements of key components for real-world deployment, such as explicit bidding, creative selection, ad allocation, and payment computation. To bridge this gap, we introduce End-to-End Generative Advertising (EGA-V2), the first unified framework that holistically models user interests, point-of-interest (POI) and creative generation, ad allocation, and payment optimization within a single generative model. Our approach employs hierarchical tokenization and multi-token prediction to jointly generate POI recommendations and ad creatives, while a permutation-aware reward model and token-level bidding strategy ensure alignment with both user experiences and advertiser objectives. Additionally, we decouple allocation from payment using a differentiable ex-post regret minimization mechanism, guaranteeing approximate incentive compatibility at the POI level. Through extensive offline evaluations we demonstrate that EGA-V2 significantly outperforms traditional cascaded systems in both performance and practicality. Our results highlight its potential as a pioneering fully generative advertising solution, paving the way for next-generation industrial ad systems.
- [45] arXiv:2505.19189 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: POQD: Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer for Multi-vector retrievalComments: Published in ICML 2025Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Databases (cs.DB)
Although Multi-Vector Retrieval (MVR) has achieved the state of the art on many information retrieval (IR) tasks, its performance highly depends on how to decompose queries into smaller pieces, say phrases or tokens. However, optimizing query decomposition for MVR performance is not end-to-end differentiable. Even worse, jointly solving this problem and training the downstream retrieval-based systems, say RAG systems could be highly inefficient. To overcome these challenges, we propose Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer (POQD), a novel query decomposition framework for MVR. POQD leverages one LLM for query decomposition and searches the optimal prompt with an LLM-based optimizer. We further propose an end-to-end training algorithm to alternatively optimize the prompt for query decomposition and the downstream models. This algorithm can achieve superior MVR performance at a reasonable training cost as our theoretical analysis suggests. POQD can be integrated seamlessly into arbitrary retrieval-based systems such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Extensive empirical studies on representative RAG-based QA tasks show that POQD outperforms existing query decomposition strategies in both retrieval performance and end-to-end QA accuracy. POQD is available at this https URL.
- [46] arXiv:2505.19755 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: EGA-V1: Unifying Online Advertising with End-to-End LearningJunyan Qiu, Ze Wang, Fan Zhang, Zuowu Zheng, Jile Zhu, Jiangke Fan, Teng Zhang, Haitao Wang, Yongkang Wang, Xingxing WangSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Modern industrial advertising systems commonly employ Multi-stage Cascading Architectures (MCA) to balance computational efficiency with ranking accuracy. However, this approach presents two fundamental challenges: (1) performance inconsistencies arising from divergent optimization targets and capability differences between stages, and (2) failure to account for advertisement externalities - the complex interactions between candidate ads during ranking. These limitations ultimately compromise system effectiveness and reduce platform profitability. In this paper, we present EGA-V1, an end-to-end generative architecture that unifies online advertising ranking as one model. EGA-V1 replaces cascaded stages with a single model to directly generate optimal ad sequences from the full candidate ad corpus in location-based services (LBS). The primary challenges associated with this approach stem from high costs of feature processing and computational bottlenecks in modeling externalities of large-scale candidate pools. To address these challenges, EGA-V1 introduces an algorithm and engine co-designed hybrid feature service to decouple user and ad feature processing, reducing latency while preserving expressiveness. To efficiently extract intra- and cross-sequence mutual information, we propose RecFormer with an innovative cluster-attention mechanism as its core architectural component. Furthermore, we propose a bi-stage training strategy that integrates pre-training with reinforcement learning-based post-training to meet sophisticated platform and advertising objectives. Extensive offline evaluations on public benchmarks and large-scale online A/B testing on industrial advertising platform have demonstrated the superior performance of EGA-V1 over state-of-the-art MCAs.
- [47] arXiv:2505.20368 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Hierarchical Retrieval with Evidence Curation for Open-Domain Financial Question Answering on Standardized DocumentsComments: ACL 2025 (Findings)Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based large language models (LLMs) are widely used in finance for their excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, standardized documents (e.g., SEC filing) share similar formats such as repetitive boilerplate texts, and similar table structures. This similarity forces traditional RAG methods to misidentify near-duplicate text, leading to duplicate retrieval that undermines accuracy and completeness. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Retrieval with Evidence Curation (HiREC) framework. Our approach first performs hierarchical retrieval to reduce confusion among similar texts. It first retrieve related documents and then selects the most relevant passages from the documents. The evidence curation process removes irrelevant passages. When necessary, it automatically generates complementary queries to collect missing information. To evaluate our approach, we construct and release a Large-scale Open-domain Financial (LOFin) question answering benchmark that includes 145,897 SEC documents and 1,595 question-answer pairs. Our code and data are available at this https URL.
- [48] arXiv:2505.22238 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Yambda-5B -- A Large-Scale Multi-modal Dataset for Ranking And RetrievalA. Ploshkin, V. Tytskiy, A. Pismenny, V. Baikalov, E. Taychinov, A. Permiakov, D. Burlakov, E. Krofto, N. SavushkinSubjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
We present Yambda-5B, a large-scale open dataset sourced from the Yandex Music streaming platform. Yambda-5B contains 4.79 billion user-item interactions from 1 million users across 9.39 million tracks. The dataset includes two primary types of interactions: implicit feedback (listening events) and explicit feedback (likes, dislikes, unlikes and undislikes). In addition, we provide audio embeddings for most tracks, generated by a convolutional neural network trained on audio spectrograms. A key distinguishing feature of Yambda-5B is the inclusion of the is_organic flag, which separates organic user actions from recommendation-driven events. This distinction is critical for developing and evaluating machine learning algorithms, as Yandex Music relies on recommender systems to personalize track selection for users. To support rigorous benchmarking, we introduce an evaluation protocol based on a Global Temporal Split, allowing recommendation algorithms to be assessed in conditions that closely mirror real-world use. We report benchmark results for standard baselines (ItemKNN, iALS) and advanced models (SANSA, SASRec) using a variety of evaluation metrics. By releasing Yambda-5B to the community, we aim to provide a readily accessible, industrial-scale resource to advance research, foster innovation, and promote reproducible results in recommender systems.
- [49] arXiv:2307.00438 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Towards Resource-Efficient Streaming of Large-Scale Medical Image Datasets for Deep LearningComments: 17 pages, 4 figures, 10 tables, accepted to MIDL'25Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Large-scale medical imaging datasets have accelerated deep learning (DL) for medical image analysis. However, the large scale of these datasets poses a challenge for researchers, resulting in increased storage and bandwidth requirements for hosting and accessing them. Since different researchers have different use cases and require different resolutions or formats for DL, it is neither feasible to anticipate every researcher's needs nor practical to store data in multiple resolutions and formats. To that end, we propose the Medical Image Streaming Toolkit (MIST), a format-agnostic database that enables streaming of medical images at different resolutions and formats from a single high-resolution copy. We evaluated MIST across eight popular, large-scale medical imaging datasets spanning different body parts, modalities, and formats. Our results showed that our framework reduced the storage and bandwidth requirements for hosting and downloading datasets without impacting image quality. We demonstrate that MIST addresses the challenges posed by large-scale medical imaging datasets by building a data-efficient and format-agnostic database to meet the diverse needs of researchers and reduce barriers to DL research in medical imaging.
- [50] arXiv:2409.05806 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMsComments: ACL 2025; project website is available at this https URL code and dataset are available at this https URLSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Chinese, as a linguistic system rich in depth and complexity, is characterized by distinctive elements such as ancient poetry, proverbs, idioms, and other cultural constructs. However, current Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations in these specialized domains, highlighting the need for the development of comprehensive datasets that can assess, continuously update, and progressively improve these culturally-grounded linguistic competencies through targeted training optimizations. To address this gap, we introduce CKnowEdit, the first-ever Chinese knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in LLMs. We collect seven types of knowledge from a wide range of sources, including classical texts, idioms, and content from Baidu Tieba Ruozhiba, taking into account the unique polyphony, antithesis, and logical structures inherent in the Chinese language. By analyzing this dataset, we highlight the challenges current LLMs face in mastering Chinese. Furthermore, our evaluation of state-of-the-art knowledge editing techniques reveals opportunities to advance the correction of Chinese knowledge. Code and dataset are available at this https URL.
- [51] arXiv:2410.13248 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Disentangling Likes and Dislikes in Personalized Generative Explainable RecommendationRyotaro Shimizu, Takashi Wada, Yu Wang, Johannes Kruse, Sean O'Brien, Sai HtaungKham, Linxin Song, Yuya Yoshikawa, Yuki Saito, Fugee Tsung, Masayuki Goto, Julian McAuleyComments: This manuscript has been accepted for presentation at The Web Conference (WWW) 2025Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Recent research on explainable recommendation generally frames the task as a standard text generation problem, and evaluates models simply based on the textual similarity between the predicted and ground-truth explanations. However, this approach fails to consider one crucial aspect of the systems: whether their outputs accurately reflect the users' (post-purchase) sentiments, i.e., whether and why they would like and/or dislike the recommended items. To shed light on this issue, we introduce new datasets and evaluation methods that focus on the users' sentiments. Specifically, we construct the datasets by explicitly extracting users' positive and negative opinions from their post-purchase reviews using an LLM, and propose to evaluate systems based on whether the generated explanations 1) align well with the users' sentiments, and 2) accurately identify both positive and negative opinions of users on the target items. We benchmark several recent models on our datasets and demonstrate that achieving strong performance on existing metrics does not ensure that the generated explanations align well with the users' sentiments. Lastly, we find that existing models can provide more sentiment-aware explanations when the users' (predicted) ratings for the target items are directly fed into the models as input. The datasets and benchmark implementation are available at: this https URL.
- [52] arXiv:2412.05710 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: PromptRefine: Enhancing Few-Shot Performance on Low-Resource Indic Languages with Example Selection from Related Example BanksComments: Accepted at NAACL 2025Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capabilities through in-context learning (ICL). However, ICL performance is highly dependent on the choice of few-shot demonstrations, making the selection of the most optimal examples a persistent research challenge. This issue is further amplified in low-resource Indic languages, where the scarcity of ground-truth data complicates the selection process. In this work, we propose PromptRefine, a novel Alternating Minimization approach for example selection that improves ICL performance on low-resource Indic languages. PromptRefine leverages auxiliary example banks from related high-resource Indic languages and employs multi-task learning techniques to align language-specific retrievers, enabling effective cross-language retrieval. Additionally, we incorporate diversity in the selected examples to enhance generalization and reduce bias. Through comprehensive evaluations on four text generation tasks -- Cross-Lingual Question Answering, Multilingual Question Answering, Machine Translation, and Cross-Lingual Summarization using state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLAMA-3.1-8B, LLAMA-2-7B, Qwen-2-7B, and Qwen-2.5-7B, we demonstrate that PromptRefine significantly outperforms existing frameworks for retrieving examples.
- [53] arXiv:2501.03835 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value IdentificationYindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Liyu Chen, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng ChenComments: Camera-ready version of the paper accepted at ACL 2025Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Product Attribute Value Identification (PAVI) involves identifying attribute values from product profiles, a key task for improving product search, recommendation, and business analytics on e-commerce platforms. However, existing PAVI methods face critical challenges, such as inferring implicit values, handling out-of-distribution (OOD) values, and producing normalized outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce Taxonomy-Aware Contrastive Learning Retrieval (TACLR), the first retrieval-based method for PAVI. TACLR formulates PAVI as an information retrieval task by encoding product profiles and candidate values into embeddings and retrieving values based on their similarity. It leverages contrastive training with taxonomy-aware hard negative sampling and employs adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. TACLR offers three key advantages: (1) it effectively handles implicit and OOD values while producing normalized outputs; (2) it scales to thousands of categories, tens of thousands of attributes, and millions of values; and (3) it supports efficient inference for high-load industrial deployment. Extensive experiments on proprietary and public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of TACLR. Further, it has been successfully deployed on the real-world e-commerce platform Xianyu, processing millions of product listings daily with frequently updated, large-scale attribute taxonomies. We release the code to facilitate reproducibility and future research at this https URL.
- [54] arXiv:2501.14956 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: ExPerT: Effective and Explainable Evaluation of Personalized Long-Form Text GenerationSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Evaluating personalized text generated by large language models (LLMs) is challenging, as only the LLM user, i.e., prompt author, can reliably assess the output, but re-engaging the same individuals across studies is infeasible. This paper addresses the challenge of evaluating personalized text generation by introducing ExPerT, an explainable reference-based evaluation framework. ExPerT leverages an LLM to extract atomic aspects and their evidence from the generated and reference texts, match the aspects, and evaluate their alignment based on content and writing style -- two key attributes in personalized text generation. Additionally, ExPerT generates detailed, fine-grained explanations for every step of the evaluation process, enhancing transparency and interpretability. Our experiments demonstrate that ExPerT achieves a 7.2% relative improvement in alignment with human judgments compared to the state-of-the-art text generation evaluation methods. Furthermore, human evaluators rated the usability of ExPerT's explanations at 4.7 out of 5, highlighting its effectiveness in making evaluation decisions more interpretable.
- [55] arXiv:2502.08826 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Ask in Any Modality: A Comprehensive Survey on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented GenerationMohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Amirhosein Zobeiri, Mahdi Dehghani, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Bardia Mohammadi, Omid Ghahroodi, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah, Ehsaneddin AsgariComments: GitHub repository: this https URLSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and outdated knowledge due to their reliance on static training data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by integrating external dynamic information for improved factual grounding. With advances in multimodal learning, Multimodal RAG extends this approach by incorporating multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to enhance the generated outputs. However, cross-modal alignment and reasoning introduce unique challenges beyond those in unimodal RAG. This survey offers a structured and comprehensive analysis of Multimodal RAG systems, covering datasets, benchmarks, metrics, evaluation, methodologies, and innovations in retrieval, fusion, augmentation, and generation. We review training strategies, robustness enhancements, loss functions, and agent-based approaches, while also exploring the diverse Multimodal RAG scenarios. In addition, we outline open challenges and future directions to guide research in this evolving field. This survey lays the foundation for developing more capable and reliable AI systems that effectively leverage multimodal dynamic external knowledge bases. All resources are publicly available at this https URL.
- [56] arXiv:2502.19163 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data ConsistencyHenry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. YuComments: Accepted by ACL 2025 main conferenceSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Test-time computing approaches, which leverage additional computational resources during inference, have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. This work introduces a novel, linearly scaling approach, TestNUC, that improves test-time predictions by leveraging the local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data-it classifies an input instance by considering not only the model's prediction on that instance but also on neighboring unlabeled instances. We evaluate TestNUC across eight diverse datasets, spanning intent classification, topic mining, domain discovery, and emotion detection, demonstrating its consistent superiority over baseline methods such as standard prompting and self-consistency. Furthermore, TestNUC can be seamlessly integrated with existing test-time computing approaches, substantially boosting their performance. Our analysis reveals that TestNUC scales effectively with increasing amounts of unlabeled data and performs robustly across different embedding models, making it practical for real-world applications. Our code is available at this https URL.
- [57] arXiv:2502.20317 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval over Text-rich Graph Knowledge BasesYongjia Lei, Haoyu Han, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Jiliang Tang, Yu WangSubjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs) have become increasingly crucial for answering queries by providing textual and structural knowledge. However, current retrieval methods often retrieve these two types of knowledge in isolation without considering their mutual reinforcement and some hybrid methods even bypass structural retrieval entirely after neighboring aggregation. To fill in this gap, we propose a Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval (MoR) to retrieve these two types of knowledge via a Planning-Reasoning-Organizing framework. In the Planning stage, MoR generates textual planning graphs delineating the logic for answering queries. Following planning graphs, in the Reasoning stage, MoR interweaves structural traversal and textual matching to obtain candidates from TG-KBs. In the Organizing stage, MoR further reranks fetched candidates based on their structural trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MoR in harmonizing structural and textual retrieval with insights, including uneven retrieving performance across different query logics and the benefits of integrating structural trajectories for candidate reranking. Our code is available at this https URL.
- [58] arXiv:2503.04796 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Optimizing Multi-Hop Document Retrieval Through Intermediate RepresentationsComments: Accepted by ACL 2025 FindingsSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) encounters challenges when addressing complex queries, particularly multi-hop questions. While several methods tackle multi-hop queries by iteratively generating internal queries and retrieving external documents, these approaches are computationally expensive. In this paper, we identify a three-stage information processing pattern in LLMs during layer-by-layer reasoning, consisting of extraction, processing, and subsequent extraction steps. This observation suggests that the representations in intermediate layers contain richer information compared to those in other layers. Building on this insight, we propose Layer-wise RAG (L-RAG). Unlike prior methods that focus on generating new internal queries, L-RAG leverages intermediate representations from the middle layers, which capture next-hop information, to retrieve external knowledge. L-RAG achieves performance comparable to multi-step approaches while maintaining inference overhead similar to that of standard RAG. Experimental results show that L-RAG outperforms existing RAG methods on open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets, including MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The code is available in this https URL
- [59] arXiv:2503.05315 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: LoRACode: LoRA Adapters for Code EmbeddingsComments: Accepted at the Deep Learning for Code (DL4C) Workshop at ICLR 2025Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Code embeddings are essential for semantic code search; however, current approaches often struggle to capture the precise syntactic and contextual nuances inherent in code. Open-source models such as CodeBERT and UniXcoder exhibit limitations in scalability and efficiency, while high-performing proprietary systems impose substantial computational costs. We introduce a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to construct task-specific adapters for code retrieval. Our approach reduces the number of trainable parameters to less than two percent of the base model, enabling rapid fine-tuning on extensive code corpora (2 million samples in 25 minutes on two H100 GPUs). Experiments demonstrate an increase of up to 9.1% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) for Code2Code search, and up to 86.69% for Text2Code search tasks across multiple programming languages. Distinction in task-wise and language-wise adaptation helps explore the sensitivity of code retrieval for syntactical and linguistic variations. To foster research in this area, we make our code and pre-trained models publicly available.
- [60] arXiv:2503.22877 (replaced) [pdf, other]
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Title: Understanding Inequality of LLM Fact-Checking over Geographic Regions with Agent and Retrieval modelsSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Fact-checking is a potentially useful application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to combat the growing dissemination of disinformation. However, the performance of LLMs varies across geographic regions. In this paper, we evaluate the factual accuracy of open and private models across a diverse set of regions and scenarios.
Using a dataset containing 600 fact-checked statements balanced across six global regions we examine three experimental setups of fact-checking a statement: (1) when just the statement is available, (2) when an LLM-based agent with Wikipedia access is utilized, and (3) as a best case scenario when a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system provided with the official fact check is employed. Our findings reveal that regardless of the scenario and LLM used, including GPT-4, Claude Sonnet, and LLaMA, statements from the Global North perform substantially better than those from the Global South. Furthermore, this gap is broadened for the more realistic case of a Wikipedia agent-based system, highlighting that overly general knowledge bases have a limited ability to address region-specific nuances. These results underscore the urgent need for better dataset balancing and robust retrieval strategies to enhance LLM fact-checking capabilities, particularly in geographically diverse contexts. - [61] arXiv:2505.01136 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Descriptor: C++ Self-Admitted Technical Debt Dataset (CppSATD)Subjects: Software Engineering (cs.SE); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Programming Languages (cs.PL)
In software development, technical debt (TD) refers to suboptimal implementation choices made by the developers to meet urgent deadlines and limited resources, posing challenges for future maintenance. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a sub-type of TD, representing specific TD instances ``openly admitted'' by the developers and often expressed through source code comments. Previous research on SATD has focused predominantly on the Java programming language, revealing a significant gap in cross-language SATD. Such a narrow focus limits the generalizability of existing findings as well as SATD detection techniques across multiple programming languages. Our work addresses such limitation by introducing CppSATD, a dedicated C++ SATD dataset, comprising over 531,000 annotated comments and their source code contexts. Our dataset can serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to develop SATD detection methods in C++, generalize the existing findings to other languages, or contribute novel insights to cross-language SATD research.
- [62] arXiv:2505.12499 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: Contrastive Alignment with Semantic Gap-Aware Corrections in Text-Video RetrievalSubjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Multimedia (cs.MM)
Recent advances in text-video retrieval have been largely driven by contrastive learning frameworks. However, existing methods overlook a key source of optimization tension: the separation between text and video distributions in the representation space (referred to as the modality gap), and the prevalence of false negatives in batch sampling. These factors lead to conflicting gradients under the InfoNCE loss, impeding stable alignment. To mitigate this, we propose GARE, a Gap-Aware Retrieval framework that introduces a learnable, pair-specific increment Delta_ij between text t_i and video v_j to offload the tension from the global anchor representation. We first derive the ideal form of Delta_ij via a coupled multivariate first-order Taylor approximation of the InfoNCE loss under a trust-region constraint, revealing it as a mechanism for resolving gradient conflicts by guiding updates along a locally optimal descent direction. Due to the high cost of directly computing Delta_ij, we introduce a lightweight neural module conditioned on the semantic gap between each video-text pair, enabling structure-aware correction guided by gradient supervision. To further stabilize learning and promote interpretability, we regularize Delta using three components: a trust-region constraint to prevent oscillation, a directional diversity term to promote semantic coverage, and an information bottleneck to limit redundancy. Experiments across four retrieval benchmarks show that GARE consistently improves alignment accuracy and robustness to noisy supervision, confirming the effectiveness of gap-aware tension mitigation.
- [63] arXiv:2505.18458 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: A Survey of LLM $\times$ DATAXuanhe Zhou, Junxuan He, Wei Zhou, Haodong Chen, Zirui Tang, Haoyu Zhao, Xin Tong, Guoliang Li, Youmin Chen, Jun Zhou, Zhaojun Sun, Binyuan Hui, Shuo Wang, Conghui He, Zhiyuan Liu, Jingren Zhou, Fan WuComments: Please refer to the paper list at: this https URLSubjects: Databases (cs.DB); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
The integration of large language model (LLM) and data management (DATA) is rapidly redefining both domains. In this survey, we comprehensively review the bidirectional relationships. On the one hand, DATA4LLM, spanning large-scale data processing, storage, and serving, feeds LLMs with high quality, diversity, and timeliness of data required for stages like pre-training, post-training, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows: (i) Data processing for LLMs includes scalable acquisition, deduplication, filtering, selection, domain mixing, and synthetic augmentation; (ii) Data Storage for LLMs focuses on efficient data and model formats, distributed and heterogeneous storage hierarchies, KV-cache management, and fault-tolerant checkpointing; (iii) Data serving for LLMs tackles challenges in RAG (e.g., knowledge post-processing), LLM inference (e.g., prompt compression, data provenance), and training strategies (e.g., data packing and shuffling). On the other hand, in LLM4DATA, LLMs are emerging as general-purpose engines for data management. We review recent advances in (i) data manipulation, including automatic data cleaning, integration, discovery; (ii) data analysis, covering reasoning over structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and (iii) system optimization (e.g., configuration tuning, query rewriting, anomaly diagnosis), powered by LLM techniques like retrieval-augmented prompting, task-specialized fine-tuning, and multi-agent collaboration.
- [64] arXiv:2505.20243 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Information Retrieval and Question AnsweringSubjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Time plays a critical role in how information is generated, retrieved, and interpreted. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of Temporal Information Retrieval and Temporal Question Answering, two research areas aimed at handling and understanding time-sensitive information. As the amount of time-stamped content from sources like news articles, web archives, and knowledge bases increases, systems must address challenges such as detecting temporal intent, normalizing time expressions, ordering events, and reasoning over evolving or ambiguous facts. These challenges are critical across many dynamic and time-sensitive domains, from news and encyclopedias to science, history, and social media. We review both traditional approaches and modern neural methods, including those that use transformer models and Large Language Models (LLMs). We also review recent advances in temporal language modeling, multi-hop reasoning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), alongside benchmark datasets and evaluation strategies that test temporal robustness, recency awareness, and generalization.
- [65] arXiv:2505.24584 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]
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Title: AutoChemSchematic AI: A Closed-Loop, Physics-Aware Agentic Framework for Auto-Generating Chemical Process and Instrumentation DiagramsSubjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
Recent advancements in generative AI have accelerated the discovery of novel chemicals and materials; however, transitioning these discoveries to industrial-scale production remains a critical bottleneck, as it requires the development of entirely new chemical manufacturing processes. Current AI methods cannot auto-generate PFDs or PIDs, despite their critical role in scaling chemical processes, while adhering to engineering constraints. We present a closed loop, physics aware framework for the automated generation of industrially viable PFDs and PIDs. The framework integrates domain specialized small scale language models (SLMs) (trained for chemical process QA tasks) with first principles simulation, leveraging three key components: (1) a hierarchical knowledge graph of process flow and instrumentation descriptions for 1,020+ chemicals, (2) a multi-stage training pipeline that fine tunes domain specialized SLMs on synthetic datasets via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Retrieval-Augmented Instruction Tuning (RAIT), and (3) DWSIM based simulator in the loop validation to ensure feasibility. To improve both runtime efficiency and model compactness, the framework incorporates advanced inference time optimizations including FlashAttention, Lookahead Decoding, PagedAttention with KV-cache quantization, and Test Time Inference Scaling and independently applies structural pruning techniques (width and depth) guided by importance heuristics to reduce model size with minimal accuracy loss. Experiments demonstrate that the framework generates simulator-validated process descriptions with high fidelity, outperforms baseline methods in correctness, and generalizes to unseen chemicals. By bridging AI-driven design with industrial-scale feasibility, this work significantly reduces R&D timelines from lab discovery to plant deployment.