arXiv subjects

Zhili Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Zhili Shen.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

GEM: A Generative Embedding Model Bridging Reasoning and Retrieval

Modern LLMs excel at reasoning and instruction following, enabling users to express complex and diverse information needs. However, conventional retrievers largely rely on surface-level matching between queries and documents, resulting in a growing gap between how users express their needs and how retrievers interpret them. In this paper, we present GEM, a generative embedding model that augments retrieval through its own knowledge by explicitly reasoning about user intent and relevance criteria. GEM unifies generation and embedding within a single model: it first reasons over the query, then appends an embedding token to encode the enriched context for retrieval. Evaluated on reasoning-intensive and instruction-following retrieval tasks, GEM demonstrates the effectiveness of its reasoning-augmented retrieval, outperforming its non-reasoning variant and matching baselines using substantially larger models. Furthermore, GEM's generative nature allows test-time compute scaling via prompting to further enhance retrieval performance. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GEM.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Millions of $\text{GeAR}$-s: Extending GraphRAG to Millions of Documents

Recent studies have explored graph-based approaches to retrieval-augmented generation, leveraging structured or semi-structured information -- such as entities and their relations extracted from documents -- to enhance retrieval. However, these methods are typically designed to address specific tasks, such as multi-hop question answering and query-focused summarisation, and therefore, there is limited evidence of their general applicability across broader datasets. In this paper, we aim to adapt a state-of-the-art graph-based RAG solution: $\text{GeAR}$ and explore its performance and limitations on the SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG Challenge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) relies on effective retrieval capabilities, yet traditional sparse and dense retrievers inherently struggle with multi-hop retrieval scenarios. In this paper, we introduce GeAR, a system that advances RAG performance through two key innovations: (i) an efficient graph expansion mechanism that augments any conventional base retriever, such as BM25, and (ii) an agent framework that incorporates the resulting graph-based retrieval into a multi-step retrieval framework. Our evaluation demonstrates GeAR's superior retrieval capabilities across three multi-hop question answering datasets. Notably, our system achieves state-of-the-art results with improvements exceeding 10% on the challenging MuSiQue dataset, while consuming fewer tokens and requiring fewer iterations than existing multi-step retrieval systems. The project page is available at https://gear-rag.github.io.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Improving Retrieval-augmented Text-to-SQL with AST-based Ranking and Schema Pruning

We focus on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing from the perspective of retrieval-augmented generation. Motivated by challenges related to the size of commercial database schemata and the deployability of business intelligence solutions, we propose $\text{ASTReS}$ that dynamically retrieves input database information and uses abstract syntax trees to select few-shot examples for in-context learning. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which an in-parallel semantic parser can be leveraged for generating approximated versions of the expected SQL queries, to support our retrieval. We take this approach to the extreme--we adapt a model consisting of less than $500$M parameters, to act as an extremely efficient approximator, enhancing it with the ability to process schemata in a parallelised manner. We apply $\text{ASTReS}$ to monolingual and cross-lingual benchmarks for semantic parsing, showing improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive experiments highlight the contribution of modules involved in this retrieval-augmented generation setting, revealing interesting directions for future work.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

The Fire Thief Is Also the Keeper: Balancing Usability and Privacy in Prompts

The rapid adoption of online chatbots represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. However, this convenience brings considerable privacy concerns, as prompts can inadvertently contain sensitive information exposed to large language models (LLMs). Limited by high computational costs, reduced task usability, and excessive system modifications, previous works based on local deployment, embedding perturbation, and homomorphic encryption are inapplicable to online prompt-based LLM applications. To address these issues, this paper introduces Prompt Privacy Sanitizer (i.e., ProSan), an end-to-end prompt privacy protection framework that can produce anonymized prompts with contextual privacy removed while maintaining task usability and human readability. It can also be seamlessly integrated into the online LLM service pipeline. To achieve high usability and dynamic anonymity, ProSan flexibly adjusts its protection targets and strength based on the importance of the words and the privacy leakage risk of the prompts. Additionally, ProSan is capable of adapting to diverse computational resource conditions, ensuring privacy protection even for mobile devices with limited computing power. Our experiments demonstrate that ProSan effectively removes private information across various tasks, including question answering, text summarization, and code generation, with minimal reduction in task performance.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

SGBA: A Stealthy Scapegoat Backdoor Attack against Deep Neural Networks

Outsourced deep neural networks have been demonstrated to suffer from patch-based trojan attacks, in which an adversary poisons the training sets to inject a backdoor in the obtained model so that regular inputs can be still labeled correctly while those carrying a specific trigger are falsely given a target label. Due to the severity of such attacks, many backdoor detection and containment systems have recently, been proposed for deep neural networks. One major category among them are various model inspection schemes, which hope to detect backdoors before deploying models from non-trusted third-parties. In this paper, we show that such state-of-the-art schemes can be defeated by a so-called Scapegoat Backdoor Attack, which introduces a benign scapegoat trigger in data poisoning to prevent the defender from reversing the real abnormal trigger. In addition, it confines the values of network parameters within the same variances of those from clean model during training, which further significantly enhances the difficulty of the defender to learn the differences between legal and illegal models through machine-learning approaches. Our experiments on 3 popular datasets show that it can escape detection by all five state-of-the-art model inspection schemes. Moreover, this attack brings almost no side-effects on the attack effectiveness and guarantees the universal feature of the trigger compared with original patch-based trojan attacks.

cs.CR↗