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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a…

With the improving semantic understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), they exhibit a greater awareness and alignment with human values, but this comes at the cost of transparency. Although promising results are achieved via…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Most conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines rely on relevance-based retrieval, which often misaligns with utility -- that is, whether the retrieved passages actually improve the quality of the generated text specific to…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling the development of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 and…

Assessing the quality of outputs generated by generative models, such as large language models and vision language models, presents notable challenges. Traditional methods for evaluation typically rely on either human assessments, which are…

Training Learning-to-Rank models for e-commerce product search ranking can be challenging due to the lack of a gold standard of ranking relevance. In this paper, we decompose ranking relevance into content-based and engagement-based…

As retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) becomes more widespread, the role of retrieval is shifting from retrieving information for human browsing to retrieving context for AI reasoning. This shift creates more complex search environments,…

In the era of large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning pretrained models has become ubiquitous. Yet the theoretical underpinning remains an open question. A central question is why only a few epochs of fine-tuning are typically sufficient…

Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate a vast amount of factual information within their pre-trained weights, as evidenced by their ability to answer diverse questions across different domains. However, this knowledge is inherently…

Recommender systems are tasked to infer users' evolving preferences and rank items aligned with their intents, which calls for in-depth reasoning beyond pattern-based scoring. Recent efforts start to leverage large language models (LLMs)…

The goal of information retrieval is to recommend a list of document candidates that are most relevant to a given query. Listwise learning trains neural retrieval models by comparing various candidates simultaneously on a large scale,…

Sentence embedding is essential for many NLP tasks, with contrastive learning methods achieving strong performance using annotated datasets like NLI. Yet, the reliance on manual labels limits scalability. Recent studies leverage large…

Decoder-only LLM rerankers struggle with long documents: inference is costly and relevance signals can be diluted by irrelevant context. Motivated by an attention analysis indicating a consistent degradation trend when non-relevant text is…

Text ranking is a critical task in information retrieval. Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs), especially large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities for applying them to text ranking. While supervised…

Training a task-specific small reasoning model is challenging when direct human supervision or high-quality labels are scarce. However, LLMs with reasoning capabilities produce abundant intermediate reasoning traces that can be…

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) face significant challenges in reducing factual errors, particularly in document relevance evaluation and knowledge integration. We introduce a framework for structured relevance assessment that…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging Reinforcement Learning and extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, the challenge of performing efficient language reasoning--especially…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted in recommendation systems from the discriminative paradigm to the LLM-based generative paradigm, where the recommender autoregressively generates sequences of semantic identifiers…