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Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers.…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach to mitigate large language model (LLM) hallucinations by incorporating external knowledge retrieval. However, existing RAG frameworks often apply retrieval…

Despite considerable progress in neural relevance ranking techniques, search engines still struggle to process complex queries effectively - both in terms of precision and recall. Sparse and dense Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) approaches…

In sequential recommendation, models recommend items based on user's interaction history. To this end, current models usually incorporate information such as item descriptions and user intent or preferences. User preferences are usually not…

Causality detection and mining are important tasks in information retrieval due to their enormous use in information extraction, and knowledge graph construction. To solve these tasks, in existing literature there exist several solutions --…

Code search is an important information retrieval application. Benefits of better code search include faster new developer on-boarding, reduced software maintenance, and ease of understanding for large repositories. Despite improvements in…

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Over the past decade, contextual bandit algorithms have been gaining in popularity due to their effectiveness and flexibility in solving sequential decision problems---from online advertising and finance to clinical trial design and…

Modern retrieval agents expose many configuration choices -- LLM, retriever, number of documents, number of hops, and synthesis strategy -- each shaping both answer quality and serving cost. Today, these pipelines are typically hand-tuned…

User profile embedded in the prompt template of personalized recommendation agents play a crucial role in shaping their decision-making process. High-quality user profiles are essential for aligning agent behavior with real user interests.…

It is often desirable to distill the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller student models due to compute and memory constraints. One way to do this for classification tasks is via dataset synthesis, which can be…

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable success in solving complex tasks across a wide range of general-purpose applications. However, their performance often degrades in context-specific scenarios, such as…

Relevance judgments are crucial for evaluating information retrieval systems, but traditional human-annotated labels are time-consuming and expensive. As a result, many researchers turn to automatic alternatives to accelerate method…

Query expansion is an effective approach for mitigating vocabulary mismatch between queries and documents in information retrieval. One recent line of research uses language models to generate query-related contexts for expansion. Along…

In recent years, preference-based human feedback mechanisms have become essential for enhancing model performance across diverse applications, including conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT. However, existing approaches often neglect…

The success of expanded context windows in Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven increased use of broader context in retrieval-augmented generation. We investigate the use of LLMs for retrieval augmented question answering. While longer…

User simulation is increasingly vital to develop and evaluate recommender systems (RSs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues to simulate user behavior, they often struggle with the absence of specific task alignment…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective…

Behavior change interventions are important to coordinate societal action across a wide array of important applications, including the adoption of electrified vehicles to reduce emissions. Prior work has demonstrated that interventions for…

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), when customized with post-training on tabular data, can acquire general tabular in-context learning (TabICL) capabilities. These models are able to transfer effectively across…