Subeen Ho | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

PEARL: Front-Loading Relational Chains for Multi-Hop Table Retrieval

While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in tabular reasoning, retrieving relevant tables remains challenging due to the fragmented and relational structure of real-world data. Existing work typically relies on whole table representations that overlook cross-table semantics induced by join relationships. We propose PEARL, a training-free framework that shifts the paradigm toward vertical partitioning-based sub-table encoding. PEARL augments the retrieval corpus offline by generating multi-hop queries over pre-identified join paths and reorganizing relevant columns into vertically partitioned corpus units, enabling effective multi-table retrieval without query-time LLM inference. Experiments show that PEARL consistently outperforms existing methods, with up to +30.05% gains in R@2 on 3-hop queries. The source code is available at https://github.com/SOOB2NHO/PEARL.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

CREAM: Continual Retrieval on Dynamic Streaming Corpora with Adaptive Soft Memory

Information retrieval (IR) in dynamic data streams is a crucial task, as shifts in data distribution degrade the performance of AI-powered IR systems. To mitigate this issue, memory-based continual learning has been widely adopted for IR. However, existing methods rely on a fixed set of queries with ground-truth documents, which limits generalization to unseen data, making them impractical for real-world applications. To enable more effective learning with unseen topics of a new corpus without ground-truth labels, we propose CREAM, a self-supervised framework for memory-based continual retrieval. CREAM captures the evolving semantics of streaming queries and documents into dynamically structured soft memory and leverages it to adapt to both seen and unseen topics in an unsupervised setting. We realize this through three key techniques: fine-grained similarity estimation, regularized cluster prototyping, and stratified coreset sampling. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that CREAM exhibits superior adaptability and retrieval accuracy, outperforming the strongest method in a label-free setting by 27.79% in Success@5 and 44.5% in Recall@10 on average, and achieving performance comparable to or even exceeding that of supervised methods.

cs.IR↗