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Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful paradigm for improving large language models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive question answering. Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) leverages entity-relation graphs to support multi-hop reasoning,…
What if Information Retrieval (IR) systems did not just retrieve relevant information that is stored in their indices, but could also "understand" it and synthesise it into a single document? We present a preliminary study that makes a…
Finding desired information from large data set is a difficult problem. Information retrieval is concerned with the structure, analysis, organization, storage, searching, and retrieval of information. Index is the main constituent of an IR…
We present {\em generative clustering} (GC) for clustering a set of documents, $\mathrm{X}$, by using texts $\mathrm{Y}$ generated by large language models (LLMs) instead of by clustering the original documents $\mathrm{X}$. Because LLMs…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models with external evidence, but under a limited context budget, the key challenge is deciding which retrieved passages should be injected. We show that retrieval relevance…
Question answering (QA) systems for large document collections typically use pipelines that (i) retrieve possibly relevant documents, (ii) re-rank them, (iii) rank paragraphs or other snippets of the top-ranked documents, and (iv) select…
Generative retrieval is a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that generates identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target. This paradigm leverages powerful generative language models, distinct from traditional sparse…
Efficiently solving sparse linear systems $Ax=b$, where $A$ is a large, sparse, symmetric positive semi-definite matrix, is a core challenge in scientific computing, machine learning, and optimization. A major bottleneck in Gaussian…
A theoretic framework for multimedia information retrieval is introduced which guarantees optimal retrieval effectiveness. In particular, a Ranking Principle for Distributed Multimedia-Documents (RPDM) is described together with an…
Large language models with retrieval-augmented generation encounter a pivotal challenge in intricate retrieval tasks, e.g., multi-hop question answering, which requires the model to navigate across multiple documents and generate…
RAG systems rely on rerankers to identify relevant documents. However, fine-tuning these models remains challenging due to the scarcity of annotated query-document pairs. Existing distillation-based approaches suffer from training-inference…
Neural retrievers are effective but brittle: underspecified or ambiguous queries can misdirect ranking even when relevant documents exist. Existing approaches address this brittleness only partially: LLMs rewrite queries without retriever…
Generative retrieval (GR) reframes document retrieval as an end-to-end task of generating sequential document identifiers (DocIDs). Existing GR methods predominantly rely on left-to-right auto-regressive decoding, which suffers from two…
We introduce and define the novel problem of multi-distribution information retrieval (IR) where given a query, systems need to retrieve passages from within multiple collections, each drawn from a different distribution. Some of these…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained considerable traction for their capability to effectively process topological data, yet their interpretability remains a critical concern. Current interpretation methods are dominated by post-hoc…
Dense Retrieval (DR) has achieved state-of-the-art first-stage ranking effectiveness. However, the efficiency of most existing DR models is limited by the large memory cost of storing dense vectors and the time-consuming nearest neighbor…
Search engines answer users' queries by listing relevant items (e.g. documents, songs, products, web pages, ...). These engines rely on algorithms that learn to rank items so as to present an ordered list maximizing the probability that it…
The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of…
Deep learning has become the most powerful machine learning tool in the last decade. However, how to efficiently train deep neural networks remains to be thoroughly solved. The widely used minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still…
Retrieval with extremely long queries and documents is a well-known and challenging task in information retrieval and is commonly known as Query-by-Document (QBD) retrieval. Specifically designed Transformer models that can handle long…