Computer Science

Semi-structured knowledge bases (SKBs) embed textual documents in a typed graph of entities and relations, and underpin applications such as product search, academic paper search, and precision-medicine inquiries. Existing hybrid retrieval…

Legal article retrieval is critical for building traceable and reliable legal AI systems, where conclusions must be grounded in specific legal articles. However, existing open-domain retrieval methods rely heavily on surface-level lexical…

We present a deep photonic neural network architecture based on ultrafast binary optical modulation from a digital micro-mirror device (DMD), optical scattering in random medium, high-speed photodetection with a CMOS sensor, and…

Multi-vector retrieval (MVR) models, exemplified by ColBERT, have established new benchmarks in retrieval accuracy by preserving fine-grained token-level interactions. However, this granularity imposes prohibitive storage and retrieval…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the question answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge and has recently been extended to multimodal settings through Vision-Language Models…

The Random Gradient hyper-heuristic was recently shown to be able to learn the optimal neighbourhood size when optimizing the LeadingOnes benchmark via the Randomised Local Search (RLS) meta-heuristic. However, for this to happen, a…

Large recommendation models have demonstrated substantial potential gains under scaling laws, yet these gains are difficult to realize in industrial recommendation systems because real-world deployment requires lightweight models with…

Late-interaction retrieval (ColBERT, ColPali) scores a query against a document with the MaxSim operator: for every query token, the maximum similarity over the document tokens, summed over query tokens. The standard implementation…

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent the majority of firms in most economies and often face financial constraints and higher vulnerability to financial distress. Predicting SME default is therefore crucial for financial…

Recently, the runtime analysis of multi-valued estimation-of-distribution algorithms in the framework of Ben Jedidia et al. (TCS 2024) has made significant advancements. However, almost all existing analyses are limited to multi-valued…

We propose Latent Terms, a method revealing that models trained for dense retrieval, whether single- or multi-vector, learn representations that can trivially be decomposed into retrieval-ready sparse features. When trained on frozen…

Recent advances in the LLM-as-Extractor paradigm leverage large language models (LLMs) to transfer semantically rich item embeddings into sequential recommendation (SR) backbones. However, LLM-generated embeddings often suffer from strong…

Evolutionary model merging provides a powerful framework for the automated, training-free composition of LLMs through parameter-space search. However, existing methods predominantly rely on stochastic, hand-crafted operators that overlook…

Item-to-Item (I2I) retrieval is a fundamental part of modern content platforms, supporting critical industrial workflows from recommendation engines to content auditing. While multimodal embedding methods have advanced general retrieval,…

Cross-market factor research studies whether firm-level signals from one or more markets can predict returns in a target market, but existing public benchmarks do not support cross-market disclosure-to-return evaluation. Building such a…

Scaling a Search Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction model, especially in high-traffic environments, presents a challenge: superior model quality needs to be balanced with strict constraints on training cost and serving latency. This paper…

Traditional recommender systems (RecSys) primarily infer user preferences from implicit signals (such as clicks, watches, and purchases), often neglecting the rich explicit contextual feedback users provide through verbal text, like…

Real-world user behavior rarely consists of isolated actions; instead, it often forms intent flows governed by spatiotemporal dependencies. To provide integrated service recommendations, we focus on the task of Generative Spatiotemporal…

Learning-assisted algorithm design often has to make reliable search decisions under small evaluation budgets, where committing to a single metaheuristic can be unreliable. We propose WASHH, a Whale-guided Adaptive Selection Hyper-Heuristic…

Recently, Generative Recommenders (GRs), characterized by a unified end-to-end framework, have exhibited astonishing potential in transforming the recommendation paradigm. Despite their effectiveness, we recognize that GRs are still…