Related papers: RVR: Retrieve-Verify-Retrieve for Comprehensive Qu…

Document retrieval is one of the most challenging tasks in Information Retrieval. It requires handling longer contexts, often resulting in higher query latency and increased computational overhead. Recently, Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR)…

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…

Yes, repurposing multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) models for document reranking is both feasible and valuable. This preliminary work is founded on mathematical parallels between MCQA decision-making and cross-encoder semantic…

Retrieval-augmented systems are typically evaluated in settings where information required to answer the query can be found within a single source or the answer is short-form or factoid-based. However, many real-world applications demand…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) is a powerful solution to understand and query the industry's closed-source documents. However, basic RAG often struggles with complex QA tasks in legal and…

The state of the art in open-domain question answering (QA) relies on an efficient retriever that drastically reduces the search space for the expensive reader. A rather overlooked question in the community is the relationship between the…

In real practice, questions are typically complex and knowledge-intensive, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to recognize the multifaceted nature of the question and reason across multiple information sources. Iterative and adaptive…

Neural IR has advanced through two distinct paths: entity-oriented approaches leveraging knowledge graphs and multi-vector models capturing fine-grained semantics. We introduce QDER, a neural re-ranking model that unifies these approaches…

A classical vector retrieval problem typically considers a \emph{single} query embedding vector as input and retrieves the most similar embedding vectors from a vector database. However, complex reasoning and retrieval tasks frequently…

We present a comprehensive study of answer quality evaluation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications using vRAG-Eval, a novel grading system that is designed to assess correctness, completeness, and honesty. We further map the…

Explainable information retrieval is an emerging research area aiming to make transparent and trustworthy information retrieval systems. Given the increasing use of complex machine learning models in search systems, explainability is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they face inherent limitations such as constrained parametric knowledge and high retraining costs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments the…

Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a critical method for empowering LLMs by leveraging candidate visual documents. However, current methods consider the entire document as the basic retrieval unit, introducing…

Retrieval-based multimodal document QA aims to identify and integrate relevant information from visually rich documents with complex multimodal structures. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown strong performance in…

Adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (ARAG) aims to dynamically determine the necessity of retrieval for queries instead of retrieving indiscriminately to enhance the efficiency and relevance of the sourced information. However, previous…

Learned multivector representations power modern search systems with strong retrieval effectiveness, but their real-world use is limited by the high cost of exhaustive token-level retrieval. Therefore, most systems adopt a…

Iterative retrieval-augmented generation (iRAG) models offer an effective approach for multi-hop question answering (QA). However, their retrieval process faces two key challenges: (1) it can be disrupted by irrelevant documents or…

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…

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models. However, standard outcome-based supervision suffers from a critical…

Users often make ambiguous requests that require clarification. We study the problem of asking clarification questions in an information retrieval setting, where systems often face ambiguous search queries and it is challenging to turn the…