arXiv subjects

Adnan Qidwai

Publications and source records attributed to Adnan Qidwai.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SearchWiki: Learning to Build and Navigate Knowledge Wikis for Active Information Seeking

Flat retrieval-augmented generation treats a corpus as a bag of chunks, discarding document hierarchy and cross document structure. We introduce SearchWiki, a harness framework that synthesizes a corpus into a hierarchical, typed, navigable wiki and trains an agent, WikiResearcher-9B, to retrieve information through multi-turn tool use. The wiki organizes knowledge into three layers - document overviews, cross- document topic pages, and page-level source records; enabling progressive refinement of retrieval when initial lookup misses. We optimize the agent's navigation policy with on-policy reinforcement learning with a multi-component reward function balancing answer correctness, retrieval quality and trajectory efficiency. Evaluation on ViDoRe-V3 (8 domains), FinanceBench, and memory benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, PersonaMem-v2) shows that WikiResearcher- 9B which is our RL-tuned Qwen 9B model, significantly outperforms same-size untrained baselines and exceeds or matches larger external models. SearchWiki paired with WikiResearcher-9B demonstrates that learned navigation over structured corpora is a superior alternative to flat retrieval.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

BONSAI: Evolvability-Guided Tree Search over Skills

A skill is a naturallanguage document that steers a frozen agent whose weights cannot be updated so any capability the agent lacks must be supplied in prose Optimising a skill is therefore optimising text against a score and the standard recipe which keeps any edit that raises a heldout score is blind in a specific way a single score cannot tell a document perched on a narrow overfit spike from one resting on a broad plateau even though only the second can still be improved We introduce BONSAI a novel skilloptimisation framework that steers instead by evolvability the capacity of a region of documentspace to keep producing viable variation under further mutation a property biology treats as separate from present fitness BONSAI grows skills as a MonteCarlo search tree in which every child document is a mutation of its parent and descends it under an upperconfidence selection rule whose exploitation term blends a skills own fitness with the fitness of its mutational neighbourhood Because every child is a mutation the mean score recorded beneath a node estimates that neighbourhoods evolvability at no extra cost so the rule concentrates budget on regions that keep improving while its exploration term keeps a currently weak branch in contention BONSAI ships the single bestscoring document it finds at no cost beyond the acceptifbetter loop it replaces With a frozen 30B agent and averaged over three benchmarks BONSAI lifts heldout accuracy over the skillfree agent by 2313 points and improves on two budgetmatched baselines GEPA and SkillOpt by 387 and 397 points respectively

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CAMI: Cost-Aware Agent-Guided Multi-Indexing for Semantic Retrieval

RAG ingestion pipelines frequently augment search corpus index with semantic enrichment indices (e.g., synthetic queries or summaries generated from corpus chunks) that are subsequently queried alongside the base index to improve retrieval via better alignment between document representations and user intent. While these supplementary representations substantially improve retrieval quality, they introduce a computational bottleneck: the configuration space of enrichment types and generator models is combinatorial, and the cost of exhaustive index-time evaluation scales linearly with corpus size. We introduce CAMI (Cost-Aware Multi-Indexing), a framework that formalizes multi-index construction as a budgeted, multi-objective portfolio selection problem. CAMI targets the upstream decision of which enrichment views to generate and materialize before the retrieval backend is applied. CAMI incorporates three primary mechanisms: (i) an agentic discovery phase that proposes corpus-specific representation templates; (ii) an atomic-unit search procedure that evaluates individual enrichment-model pairs and recombines them via fidelity-local closure to identify synergistic portfolios; and (iii) a confidence-aware promotion schedule that prunes unpromising configurations early, decoupling optimization spend from total corpus size. We evaluate CAMI across diverse retrieval corpora. Our findings reveal that the framework systematically isolates high-recall portfolios under strict budget constraints, outperforming standard content-only baselines in challenging settings by up to 9.4% recall@10. Further, CAMI is able to systematically identify these high-recall portfolios using up to 5x less budget compared to random search baselines, making our approach practical in real production scenarios.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

InterChart: Benchmarking Visual Reasoning Across Decomposed and Distributed Chart Information

We introduce InterChart, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how well vision-language models (VLMs) reason across multiple related charts, a task central to real-world applications such as scientific reporting, financial analysis, and public policy dashboards. Unlike prior benchmarks focusing on isolated, visually uniform charts, InterChart challenges models with diverse question types ranging from entity inference and trend correlation to numerical estimation and abstract multi-step reasoning grounded in 2-3 thematically or structurally related charts. We organize the benchmark into three tiers of increasing difficulty: (1) factual reasoning over individual charts, (2) integrative analysis across synthetically aligned chart sets, and (3) semantic inference over visually complex, real-world chart pairs. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs reveals consistent and steep accuracy declines as chart complexity increases. We find that models perform better when we decompose multi-entity charts into simpler visual units, underscoring their struggles with cross-chart integration. By exposing these systematic limitations, InterChart provides a rigorous framework for advancing multimodal reasoning in complex, multi-visual environments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

PRAISE: Enhancing Product Descriptions with LLM-Driven Structured Insights

Accurate and complete product descriptions are crucial for e-commerce, yet seller-provided information often falls short. Customer reviews offer valuable details but are laborious to sift through manually. We present PRAISE: Product Review Attribute Insight Structuring Engine, a novel system that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract, compare, and structure insights from customer reviews and seller descriptions. PRAISE provides users with an intuitive interface to identify missing, contradictory, or partially matching details between these two sources, presenting the discrepancies in a clear, structured format alongside supporting evidence from reviews. This allows sellers to easily enhance their product listings for clarity and persuasiveness, and buyers to better assess product reliability. Our demonstration showcases PRAISE's workflow, its effectiveness in generating actionable structured insights from unstructured reviews, and its potential to significantly improve the quality and trustworthiness of e-commerce product catalogs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Aided Customizable Profiling of Code Data Based On Programming Language Concepts

Data profiling is critical in machine learning for generating descriptive statistics, supporting both deeper understanding and downstream tasks like data valuation and curation. This work addresses profiling specifically in the context of code datasets for Large Language Models (code-LLMs), where data quality directly influences tasks such as code generation and summarization. Characterizing code datasets in terms of programming language concepts enables better insights and targeted data curation. Our proposed methodology decomposes code data profiling into two phases: (1) an offline phase where LLMs are leveraged to derive and learn rules for extracting syntactic and semantic concepts across various programming languages, including previously unseen or low-resource languages, and (2) an online deterministic phase applying these derived rules for efficient real-time analysis. This hybrid approach is customizable, extensible to new syntactic and semantic constructs, and scalable to multiple languages. Experimentally, our LLM-aided method achieves a mean accuracy of 90.33% for syntactic extraction rules and semantic classification accuracies averaging 80% and 77% across languages and semantic concepts, respectively.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Unraveling the Truth: Do VLMs really Understand Charts? A Deep Dive into Consistency and Robustness

Chart question answering (CQA) is a crucial area of Visual Language Understanding. However, the robustness and consistency of current Visual Language Models (VLMs) in this field remain under-explored. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art VLMs on comprehensive datasets, developed specifically for this study, encompassing diverse question categories and chart formats. We investigate two key aspects: 1) the models' ability to handle varying levels of chart and question complexity, and 2) their robustness across different visual representations of the same underlying data. Our analysis reveals significant performance variations based on question and chart types, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of current models. Additionally, we identify areas for improvement and propose future research directions to build more robust and reliable CQA systems. This study sheds light on the limitations of current models and paves the way for future advancements in the field.

cs.CL↗