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Changxing Li, Donglin Zhang 0001, Zhikai Hu, Xiao-Jun Wu 0001, Josef Kittler

Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) aims to retrieve images that accurately correspond to abstract hand-drawn sketches, requiring the model to understand sparse and abstract visual cues. Existing methods tend to rely on convolutional networks or metric learning to align sketch and image features, often overlooking the inherent abstraction and semantic ambiguity present in sketches. This limitation results in an insufficient understanding of fine-grained visual details. To address this challenge, we propose SketchMind, a novel method that leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance abstract sketch understanding in FG-SBIR. Specifically, we use MLLMs to generate auxiliary textual descriptions based on the given sketches via a Visual Question Answering (VQA) strategy. To effectively incorporate these descriptions, we construct a graph structure with the sketch as the central node and the generated texts as peripheral nodes. A graph attention scheme is employed to perform uncertainty-aware feature fusion, enabling the model to suppress noisy or irrelevant textual information. Furthermore, to enhance both inter- and intra-modal fine-grained alignment, we design a Multi-scale Cross-modal Jigsaw Matching module in combination with a self-supervised learning strategy, which captures local and global visual correspondences across modalities more effectively. Extensive experiments on three benchmark FG-SBIR datasets demonstrate that SketchMind achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, proving its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/li1changxing/MLLM_FG_SBIR/.

Yunhao Liu, Zian Jia, Xinyu Gao, Kanjun Xu, Yun Xiong

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively grounds Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge and is widely applied to Web-related tasks. However, its scalability is hindered by excessive context length and redundant retrievals. Recent research on soft context compression aims to address this by encoding long documents into compact embeddings, yet they often underperform non-compressed RAG due to their reliance on auto-encoder-like full-compression that forces the encoder to compress all document information regardless of relevance to the input query. In this work, we conduct an analysis on this paradigm and reveal two fundamental limitations: (I) Infeasibility: full-compression conflicts with the LLM's downstream generation behavior; and (II) Non-necessity: full-compression is unnecessary and dilutes task-relevant information density. Motivated by these insights, we introduce SeleCom, a selector-based soft compression framework for RAG that redefines the encoder's role as query-conditioned information selector. The selector is decoder-only and is trained with a massive, diverse and difficulty-graded synthetic QA dataset with curriculum learning. Extensive experiments show that SeleCom significantly outperforms existing soft compression approaches and achieves competitive or superior performance to non-compression baselines, while reducing computation and latency by 33.8%~84.6%.

Helia Hashemi, Victor Rühle, Saravan Rajmohan

Reasoning models have gained significant attention due to their strong performance, particularly when enhanced with retrieval augmentation. However, these models often incur high computational costs, as both retrieval and reasoning tokens contribute substantially to the overall resource usage. In this work, we make the following contributions: (1) we propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning model that dynamically adjusts the length of the retrieved document list based on the query and retrieval results; (2) we develop a cost-aware advantage function for training of efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning models through reinforcement learning; and (3) we explore both memory- and latency-bound implementations of the proposed cost-aware framework for both proximal and group relative policy optimization algorithms. We evaluate our approach on seven public question answering datasets and demonstrate significant efficiency gains, without compromising effectiveness. In fact, we observed that the model latency decreases by ~16-20% across datasets, while its effectiveness increases by ~5% on average, in terms of exact match.

Lei Li 0053, Xiao Zhou 0005, Yingying Zhang, Xian Wu 0001

Medical question answering (QA) demands reliable access to rich, domain-specific knowledge. A prevalent strategy enhances large language models (LLMs) with either external knowledge retrieved from medical corpora or parametric knowledge embedded with model parameters. Existing methods generally fall into two paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds reasoning in retrieved evidence, and Generation-Augmented Generation (GAG), which relies exclusively on internally generated contexts. However, RAG often suffers from noisy or incomplete retrieval, whereas GAG is prone to hallucinated or inaccurate content due to unconstrained generation. Both limitations can misguide reasoning and compromise answer reliability. To overcome these challenges, we propose MedRGAG, a unified retrieval--generation augmented framework that seamlessly integrates external and parametric knowledge for medical QA. MedRGAG consists of two core modules: Knowledge-Guided Context Completion (KGCC), which steers the generator to produce background documents that complement knowledge gaps revealed by retrieval, and Knowledge-Aware Document Selection (KADS), which adaptively selects an optimal combination of retrieved and generated documents to construct concise yet comprehensive evidence for answers. Extensive experiments on five medical QA benchmarks demonstrate that MedRGAG achieves a 12.5% improvement over MedRAG and a 4.5% gain over MedGENIE, highlighting the effectiveness of unifying retrieval and generation for knowledge-intensive medical reasoning. Further analyses show that our framework effectively generates complementary contexts and recovers informative retrieved evidence. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ll0ruc/MedRGAG.

Haoyu Han 0001, Kai Guo 0003, Harry Shomer, Yu Wang 0160, Yucheng Chu, Hang Li 0007, Li Ma 0012, Jiliang Tang

Reasoning over structured graphs remains a fundamental challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when scaling to large graphs. Existing approaches typically follow the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) paradigm: first retrieving subgraphs relevant to the query and then generating answers conditioned on the retrieved subgraphs. However, such two-phase pipelines often struggle to faithfully incorporate graph structure, since the generation process is ultimately constrained by the quality and completeness of the retrieved subgraph. Although many advanced retrievers have been proposed recently to mitigate this issue, they are usually tailored to the training graphs and generalize poorly to unseen graphs, which limits their practical applicability. In this work, we propose Reasoning by Exploration (RoE), a novel approach that unifies retrieval and generation by framing reasoning over graphs as a process of graph exploration. At each step, the LLM selects candidate nodes and edges to explore, gradually constructing reasoning paths and generating answers along the way. To enable effective exploration, RoE is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on gold reasoning paths, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration effectiveness and generalization. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that RoE achieves substantial overall improvements over baselines, while also generalizing effectively to unseen graphs. The code can be found at https://github.com/haoyuhan1/RoE.

Wonbin Kweon, Runchu Tian, Seongku Kang, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhiyong Lu, Jiawei Han 0001, Hwanjo Yu

Scientific document retrieval is a critical task for enabling knowledge discovery and supporting research across diverse domains. However, existing dense retrieval methods often struggle to capture fine-grained scientific concepts in texts due to their reliance on holistic embeddings and limited domain understanding. Recent approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract fine-grained semantic entities and enhance semantic matching, but they typically treat entities as independent fragments, overlooking the multi-faceted nature of scientific concepts. To address this limitation, we propose Pairwise Semantic Matching (PairSem), a framework that represents relevant semantics as entity–aspect pairs, capturing complex, multi-faceted scientific concepts. PairSem is unsupervised, base retriever-agnostic, and plug-and-play, enabling precise and context-aware matching without requiring query-document labels or entity annotations. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and retrievers demonstrate that PairSem significantly improves retrieval performance, highlighting the importance of modeling multi-aspect semantics in scientific information retrieval.

Jamshid Mozafari, Hamed Zamani, Guido Zuccon, Adam Jatowt

Despite extensive research on a wide range of question answering (QA) systems, most existing work focuses on answer containment—i.e., assuming that answers can be directly extracted and/or generated from documents in the corpus. However, some questions require inference, i.e., deriving answers that are not explicitly stated but can be inferred from the available information. We introduce Inferential QA–a new task that challenges models to infer answers from answer-supporting passages which provide only clues. To study this problem, we construct Quit (QUestions requiring Inference from Texts) dataset, comprising 7,401 questions and 2.4M passages built from high-convergence human- and machine-authored hints, labeled across three relevance levels using LLM-based answerability and human verification. Through comprehensive evaluation of retrievers, rerankers, and LLM-based readers, we show that methods effective on traditional QA tasks struggle in inferential QA: retrievers underperform, rerankers offer limited gains, and fine-tuning provides inconsistent improvements. Even reasoning-oriented LLMs fail to outperform smaller general-purpose models. These findings reveal that current QA pipelines are not yet ready for inference-based reasoning. Inferential QA thus establishes a new class of QA tasks that move towards understanding and reasoning from indirect textual evidence.

Zhangtao Cheng, Bozhu Zheng, Ting Zhong, Fan Zhou 0002

该来源暂未提供摘要。

Mingjun Zhou, Weixin Zeng, Xiang Zhao 0002

该来源暂未提供摘要。

Kuicai Dong, Shurui Huang, Fangda Ye, Wei Han, Zhi Zhang, Dexun Li, Wenjun Li, Qu Yang, Gang Wang 0056, Yichao Wang 0002 等

Deep Research systems have revolutionized how LLMs solve complex questions through iterative reasoning and evidence gathering. However, current systems remain fundamentally constrained to textual web data, overlooking the vast knowledge embedded in multimodal documents: scientific papers, technical reports, and financial documents where critical information exists in figures, tables, charts, and equations. Processing such documents demands sophisticated parsing to preserve visual semantics, intelligent chunking to maintain structural coherence, and adaptive retrieval across modalities, which are capabilities absent in existing systems. In response, we present Doc-Researcher, a unified system that bridges this gap through three integrated components: (i) deep multimodal parsing that preserves layout structure and visual semantics while creating multi-granular representations from chunk to document level, (ii) systematic retrieval architecture supporting text-only, vision-only, and hybrid paradigms with dynamic granularity selection, and (iii) iterative multi-agent workflows that decompose complex queries, progressively accumulate evidence, and synthesize comprehensive answers across documents and modalities. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce M4DocBench, the first benchmark for Multi-modal, Multi-hop, Multi-document, and Multi-turn deep research. Featuring 158 expert-annotated questions with complete evidence chains across 304 documents, M4DocBench tests capabilities that existing benchmarks cannot assess. Experiments demonstrate that Doc-Researcher achieves 50.6% accuracy, 3.4× better than state-of-the-art baselines, validating that effective document research requires not just better retrieval, but fundamentally deep parsing that preserve multimodal integrity and support iterative research. Our work establishes a new paradigm for conducting deep research on multimodal document collections.

Xiaosong Yuan, Xiaofeng Zhang 0006, Di Zhao, Yijia Zhang 0003, Ying Wang 0009

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has facilitated large language models (LLMs) by grounding facts in external knowledge. While prior RAG strategies can achieve dynamic control by detecting sentence-wise hallucination, thereby reducing unnecessary computation, they ignore the entity, statement, and their combinations. In this work, we analyze adaptive RAG methods through probing uncertainty to explore real-time entity- and statement-level verification, finding that such information can serve as training-free signals for hallucination detection, and the entropy probes can also guide principled document ranking. Inspired by these insights, we propose SeaRAG, a training-free, adaptive RAG framework that dynamically detects and mitigates hallucinations by probing LLMs at both entity and statement aspects, ranking retrieved passages via entropy-based uncertainty reduction, and regenerating evidence-grounded responses in real-time. Experiments across various Question-Answering benchmarks and multiple LLMs demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements and reduced retrieval rates. SeaRAG with self-correction outperforms Always Retrieve by up to 11.1% on TriviaQA while cutting retrieval frequency from 45.2%, offering an efficient and real-time hallucination control.

Yutao Wu 0004, Xiao Liu 0004, Yunhao Feng, Jiale Ding, Xingjun Ma

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as research assistants, yet their reliability in scholarly tasks remains under-evaluated. In this work, we introduce PaperAsk, a benchmark that systematically evaluates LLMs across four key research tasks: citation retrieval, content extraction, paper discovery, and claim verification. We evaluate GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Gemini-2.5-Flash under realistic usage conditions, using web interfaces where search operations are opaque to the user. Through controlled experiments, we find consistent reliability failures: citation retrieval fails in 48–98% of multi-reference queries, section-specific content extraction fails in 72–91% of cases, and topical paper discovery yields F1 scores below 0.32, missing over 60% of relevant literature. Further human analysis attributes these failures to the uncontrolled expansion of retrieved context and the tendency of LLMs to prioritize semantically relevant text over task instructions. Across basic tasks, the LLMs display distinct failure behaviors: ChatGPT often withholds responses rather than risk errors, whereas Gemini produces fluent but fabricated answers. To address these issues, we develop lightweight reliability classifiers trained on PaperAsk data to identify unreliable outputs. PaperAsk provides a reproducible and diagnostic framework for advancing the reliability evaluation of LLM-based scholarly assistance systems. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/wuyoscar/PaperAsk.

Zhiming Lin 0001, Canran Xiao, Kai Zhao

Multi–turn intent understanding is central to task–oriented chatbots, yet real deployments face tight token budgets and noisy contexts, and most retrieval pipelines emphasize relevance while overlooking set–level diversity and confounds such as ''more context'' or exemplar order. We ask whether retrieval diversity, rather than longer prompts, systematically improves LLM intent understanding under fixed budgets. We present a diversity–aware retrieval framework that selects in–context exemplars to balance intent coverage and linguistic variety, and integrates this selection with standard LLM decoders; the evaluation enforces budget–matched prompts and randomized positions, and includes sensitivity analyses over exemplar count, diversity strength, and backbone size. On MultiWOZ 2.4 and SGD, the approach achieves strong gains in Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) under equal token budgets, surpassing strong LLM/DST baselines, with consistent improvements across K= 4 ~ 7 and moderate latency. Overall, the study isolates and validates the impact of content diversity in retrieval and offers a simple, deployable selection principle for building accurate, budget–constrained multi–turn intent systems.

Qizhi Chen, Chao Qi, Yihong Huang, Muquan Li, Rongzheng Wang, Dongyang Zhang 0001, Ke Qin, Shuang Liang 0002

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) constructs the Knowledge Graph (KG) from external databases to enhance the timeliness and accuracy of Large Language Model (LLM) generations. However, this reliance on external data introduces new attack surfaces. Attackers can inject poisoned texts into databases to manipulate LLMs into producing harmful target responses for attacker-chosen queries. Existing research primarily focuses on attacking conventional RAG systems. However, such methods are ineffective against GraphRAG. This robustness derives from the KG abstraction of GraphRAG, which reorganizes injected text into a graph before retrieval, thereby enabling the LLM to reason based on the restructured context instead of raw poisoned passages. To expose latent security vulnerabilities in GraphRAG, we propose Knowledge Evolution Poison (KEPo), a novel poisoning attack method specifically designed for GraphRAG. For each target query, KEPo first generates a toxic event containing poisoned knowledge based on the target answer. By fabricating event backgrounds and forging knowledge evolution paths from original facts to the toxic event, it then poisons the KG and misleads the LLM into treating the poisoned knowledge as the final result. In multi-target attack scenarios, KEPo further connects multiple attack corpora, enabling their poisoned knowledge to mutually reinforce while expanding the scale of poisoned communities, thereby amplifying attack effectiveness. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that KEPo achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates for both single-target and multi-target attacks, significantly outperforming previous methods.

Qichuan Liu, Chentao Zhang, Yuxuan Hu, Chenfeng Zheng, Qinggang Zhang, Zhihong Zhang 0001

Conversational search allows multi-turn user-system interactions to support complex information seeking. It is challenging due to frequent topic shifts and ambiguous intentions in conversation. Although existing methods attempt to optimize retrieval performance through query rewriting or session encoding, they still face crucial challenges, including (1) Noisy context: the diverse types of noises in the conversation context prevent models from achieving reliable and consistent contextual understanding; (2) Poor interpretability: the lack of transparency in how results are generated undermines user trust, hindering the practical application of conversational search systems. In this paper, we propose LogiCGR, a novel framework that utilizes curriculum learning and group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to perform logic-enhanced retrieval, improving the robustness and interpretability of conversational search. Specifically, LogiCGR equips large language models (LLMs) with logical denoising and generative retrieval, integrating them seamlessly through an adaptive framework. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight module that works with generative retrieval for self-dual-path retrieval, thus delivering complementary performance gains. Extensive experiments and intuitive case studies demonstrate that our proposed LogiCGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both retrieval performance and interpretability. The code and data are available at https://github.com/GenIRAG/LogiCGR.

Xinyan Shi, Renzhi Wang, Haodong Liu, Piji Li

Recent advances in enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to use external tools have significantly extended their functional capabilities beyond internal knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on retrieval-based mechanisms to select suitable tools from massive repositories, which often struggle to align user queries with tool documentation and exhibit limited generalization. To address these issues, we propose ToolBox-RL. The code is available at https://github.com/S-cavy/ToolBox-RL., a novel reinforcement learning framework that unifies query rewriting, intent understanding, and large-scale tool retrieval into an end-to-end optimization process. ToolBox-RL introduces a query rewriting stage to better capture user intent and ensure semantic alignment with tool descriptions, while reinforcement learning encourages autonomous discovery of generalized tool-use strategies through combined cold-start and policy optimization training. Our experiments demonstrate that ToolBox-RL not only achieves the best tool call accuracy on both white-box and black-box tools but also exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-domain dataset. Ablation studies show that ToolBox-RL can adapt to different retrieval methods and maintains good performance even when incorporating a large number of distractor tools.

Dongcheon Lee, Ji-Yeon Park, Hye-Yoon Baek, Jimyeung Seo, Seyeong Kim, Byungkook Oh

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) leverages struc- tured knowledge graphs for reliable reasoning. Graph-based Retrieval- Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses the incompleteness and hallucination issues of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving query-relevant subgraphs. However, existing approaches rely on single-intent semantic retrieval, compressing queries into single representations and optimizing each query independently. This leads to narrow triple selection that omits complementary information. While multi-intent retrieval diversification addresses this limitation, it faces critical challenges: (1) semantic diversification does not guarantee reasoning performance, and (2) co-selection frequency across intents does not ensure reasoning benefit. We propose Topic-Adaptive Retrieval Diversification (TARD), based on end-to-end optimization via generation feedback. TARD adaptively extracts multiple topic-based intents through neural topic modeling and employs a Gumbel-Softmax differentiable sampling to enable joint optimization. Supervised fine-tuning aligns the topic-adaptive multi-intent selector and triple scorer with reasoning performance to achieve beneficial consensus patterns. Adaptive direct preference optimization trains the generator to utilize relevant consensus while ignoring uninformative patterns. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ show that TARD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/leedongcheon/TARD.

Guohui Ding, Jing Li, Yimin Xu, Rui Zhou 0001

Cross-modal retrieval is a fundamental task in multimedia understanding, aimed at querying samples with similar semantics in one modality (e.g., text) using another modality (e.g., image). Existing methods merely focus on point-to-point comparisons between individual samples, while overlooking the widely present many-to-many structural relationships in real-world scenarios. However, the many-to-many relationships formed by multiple samples sharing similar semantics are crucial for effectively achieving semantic alignment and accurately constructing shared semantic representations. To address this, we propose a novel hypergraph-based cross-modal retrieval approach, which explicitly establishes many-to-many associations between multiple samples using a label-driven hypergraph construction mechanism, combined with differentiated hyperedge weighting. Additionally, to avoid the limitation of information interaction direction imposed by traditional unidirectional cross-attention mechanisms, we design a bidirectional cross-attention structure, with image and text as separate query sources, to achieve symmetric semantic enhancement between modalities. The resulting joint image-text representations are then mapped as hypergraph vertices, further enhancing the model's ability to align cross-modal semantics. Since constructing a global hypergraph on a large-scale sample set would incur high computational cost, we introduce global label co-occurrence frequency to supervise the batch-level hypergraph construction, enhancing the local graph's ability to capture global semantics. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark cross-modal retrieval datasets.

Fengran Mo, Zhan Su 0002, Yuchen Hui, Jinghan Zhang 0002, Jia Ao Sun, Zheyuan Liu 0010, Chao Zhang 0014, Tetsuya Sakai, Jian-Yun Nie

The development of large language models (LLMs) has achieved superior performance in a range of downstream tasks, including LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The quality of generated content heavily relies on the usefulness of the retrieved information and the capacity of LLMs' internal information processing mechanism to incorporate it in answer generation. It is generally assumed that the retrieved information is relevant to the question. However, the retrieved information may have a variable degree of relevance and usefulness, depending on the question and the document collection. It is important to take into account the relevance of the retrieved information in answer generation. In this paper, we propose OpenDecoder, a new approach that leverages explicit evaluation of the retrieved information as quality indicator features for generation. We aim to build a RAG model that is more robust to varying levels of noisy context. Three types of explicit evaluation information are considered: relevance score, ranking score, and QPP (query performance prediction) score. The experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and better robustness of OpenDecoder by outperforming various baseline methods. Importantly, this paradigm is flexible to be integrated with the post-training of LLMs for any purposes and incorporated with any type of external indicators.

Hao Yang, Zhiyu Yang, Xupeng Zhang, Wei Wei, Yunjie Zhang, Lin Yang 0013

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a key paradigm for knowledge-intensive question answering. However, existing multi-hop RAG systems remain inefficient, as they alternate between retrieval and reasoning at each step, resulting in repeated LLM calls, high token consumption, and unstable entity grounding across hops. We propose CompactRAG, a simple yet effective framework that decouples offline corpus restructuring from online reasoning. In the offline stage, an LLM reads the corpus once and converts it into an atomic QA knowledge base, which represents knowledge as minimal, fine-grained question--answer pairs. In the online stage, complex queries are decomposed and carefully rewritten to preserve entity consistency, and are resolved through dense retrieval followed by RoBERTa-based answer extraction. Notably, during inference, the LLM is invoked only twice in total—once for sub-question decomposition and once for final answer synthesis—regardless of the number of reasoning hops. Experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue demonstrate that CompactRAG achieves competitive accuracy while substantially reducing token consumption compared to iterative RAG baselines, highlighting a cost-efficient and practical approach to multi-hop reasoning over large knowledge corpora. The implementation is available at https://github.com/How-Young-X/CompactRAG.