SEARCH · Searcharxiv

Search Searcharxiv

Search indexed arXiv papers on artificial intelligence, large language models, computer vision and robotics. Read source abstracts and follow links to arXiv.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Versioned Unified Graph Index for Dynamic Timestamp-Aware Nearest Neighbor Search

We present TiGER (Time-Integrated Graph for Efficient Retrieval), a novel approach for performing fast time-aware approximate nearest neighbor searches on dynamic vector datasets with flexibility over any possible time range. Our proposed algorithm builds and maintains a unified graph for all vectors by leveraging an index structure based on integrated versioned connectivity, allowing arbitrary time intervals to be queried directly on the unified graph without having to traverse invalid vectors. This forgoes the need for post-search filtering or merging, or separate graphs for each possible composite range. Empirical evaluations show that our method attains up to a 5x improvement in queries per second (QPS) without compromising accuracy over baselines based on filtering or per-time-segment sub-graphs. We believe that this method will enable efficient temporal analysis across evolving datasets in real-time recommendation systems, log analysis, and any scenario requiring fast similarity search over dynamic, time-segmented data.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Weaving Visual Narratives: Agentic Image Bundle Composition Beyond Atomic Visual Matching

Image retrieval has traditionally been formulated as a point-wise matching problem, where each candidate image is scored in isolation. However, this atomic paradigm fails to capture the complexity of human search intent within personal photo collections, where users often seek compact visual stories bound by structural relations rather than isolated snapshots. To address this limitation, we introduce **Image Bundle Composition (IBC)**, a novel paradigm that shifts the objective from ranking individual images to dynamically composing cohesive image bundles from a massive, unstructured photo pool. Since target bundles are not predefined, IBC presents a severe combinatorial explosion challenge and demands modeling non-decomposable joint relevance. To establish this paradigm, we construct **IBCBench**, the first IBC benchmark dataset containing 109,467 images and 667 verified queries, built via a semi-automated verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose **BundleWeaver**, an agentic framework that reformulates IBC as query-conditioned incremental hyperedge discovery. By employing a Large Language Model to adaptively search for missing relational roles and utilizing a Vision-Language Model for whole-bundle verification, BundleWeaver effectively navigates the combinatorial space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art embedding models and static decompose-and-rerank paradigms suffer from relational blindness, BundleWeaver achieves substantial performance gains, highlighting the necessity of shifting from atomic scoring to dynamic relational composition. Our dataset and code are available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

NormasTCU --- A Brazilian Portuguese IR Dataset and an Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge for Relevance Assessment

Portuguese Information Retrieval (IR) lacks public datasets, and relevance assessment for specialized collections remains costly. While Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly support relevance assessment, their reliability in non-English specialized domains remains unclear. We introduce NormasTCU (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LeandroRibeiro/NormasTCU), a Brazilian Portuguese IR dataset with 14,469 legal documents, 46 queries, and 3,048 human judgments over 812 query-document pairs. Using NormasTCU, we evaluated LLM-as-a-judge for relevance assessment by prompting three models with two prompt techniques to grade these pairs. We then compared the rankings of 15 IR systems derived from LLM-generated and human reference qrels. LLMs consistently showed a positive scoring bias (mean absolute error: 0.46--0.66 on a 0-2 scale). Furthermore, pair-level agreement with human judgments achieved only fair to moderate levels, with Cohen's kappa ranging from 0.32 to 0.53. Despite this bias, LLM-generated judgments often yielded highly similar system rankings for nDCG@10 and MRR (observed Kendall's tau greater than or equal 0.90, although the bootstrap confidence intervals did not always remain above this threshold), but were less reliable for P@10 and R@10. Notably, LLM-based rankings were sometimes more strongly correlated with the reference ranking than individual human annotations were. As a practical implication, our results suggest that LLMs could effectively support scalable relevance assessment in specialized Portuguese corpora when evaluated using nDCG or MRR (rank-aware metrics), but they should be avoided when relying on precision or recall.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

CareGraph: An Auditable Hybrid AI Framework for Evidence-Grounded Personalized Longitudinal Health Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is transforming personalized healthcare, yet fragmented clinical, self reported, and wearable evidence remains difficult to interpret and trace. We present CareGraph, an auditable hybrid AI framework that converts heterogeneous records into prioritized trends, missing context indicators, bounded next steps, discussion questions, and provenance linked explanations. CareGraph organizes evidence without diagnosing, predicting outcomes, selecting treatment, or making autonomous clinical decisions. Its pipeline covers deterministic analysis, context detection, graph construction, constrained language model synthesis, evidence validation, safety controls, and release gating. Tests used synthetic cohorts of 400 patients each for development, validation, and holdout. On holdout data, a frozen ordinary least squares trend rule with a sufficiency gate achieved 0.827 accuracy, 0.837 macro F1 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.819 to 0.854, and 0.974 insufficient data F1. Missing context detection achieved 0.815 strict micro F1 versus 0.318 for the legacy detector. On an authored holdout benchmark, safety ruleset version 1.2 achieved 1.000 precision, 0.950 recall, and 0.974 F1. An audit requiring graph retrieval across 80 patients yielded 79 syntheses and 78 presentations without fallback; one output was blocked and one failed closed because of an invalid evidence key. Against monolithic GPT 5.6 on 56 matched patients, CareGraph was faster at 40.15 versus 49.62 seconds, shorter at 661 versus 1,163 words, and showed better exploratory lexical alignment with longitudinal targets; the baseline used fewer tokens and cited more raw evidence. Graph auditing verified provenance and deterministic retrieval; incremental graph effects on generation require paired evaluation. CareGraph offers a safety bounded foundation for intelligent personalized health systems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

GRAND-HC: Graph-Refined Author Name Disambiguation

From-Scratch Name Disambiguation (SND) groups papers sharing an ambiguous name into clusters of distinct real-world authors. Existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) inherent long-tailed author distribution biases representation learning, causing over-merging of tail authors; (2) existing cluster number estimation methods are unreliable for long paper sequences, hindering large-scale deployment. We propose \textbf{GRAND-HC}, a complete end-to-end SND framework. We construct a heterogeneous paper graph via co-author, co-organization, and co-venue relations, using a graph attention network as the embedding backbone. \textbf{Harmony Contrastive Learning (HCL)} dynamically reweights training loss to suppress overfitting to prolific authors, learning discriminative embeddings. A \textbf{Graph-Refined Distance Matrix (GRDM)} leverages graph topology to optimize pairwise distances, further preventing tail author over-merging. Meanwhile, a lightweight \textbf{Paper Compression Module (PCM)} achieves accurate cluster number estimation across varying scales. Finally, Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering outputs the final clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art macro F1 performance. GRAND-HC has been deployed in a billion-scale academic database. Source code: https://github.com/baokou-fw2/GRAND-HC.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Can Large Language Models Identify Meaningful Touchpoints in Conversion Attribution?

Touchpoint selection in conversion attribution, namely identifying meaningful touchpoints contributing to conversions, is essential for e-commerce recommendation and online advertising. Current selection methods rely heavily on collaborative-filtering-based heuristics, which fail to align with user-perceived semantic intent. Through human annotation, we reveal a significant semantic gap: many implicitly-related, semantically relevant touchpoints remain undetected by existing rules. Therefore, we systematically evaluate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in identifying these hidden associations. Our evaluation shows that while LLMs effectively uncover a substantial portion of implicitly-related touchpoints, significant room for improvement remains in their selection performance. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of different prompting strategies and foundation model choices on identification performance, providing valuable insights into their reasoning patterns and effectiveness. These insights offer a new roadmap for transitioning conversion attribution from mechanical rule-matching to human-aligned semantic reasoning. Moreover, we leverage the LLM-attributed conversion labels for enhancing industrial CVR model training and achieve significant offline performance gains, showing the potential of LLMs in conversion attribution.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Graph Neural Team Recommendation: An Integrated Approach

Team recommendation aims to select an optimal subset of experts who can form an almost surely successful collaborative team for a given set of required skills. State-of-the-art methods are neural multi-label classifiers that transfer dense vector representations of skills into a sparse occurrence vector representing the optimal subset of experts. Such methods, however, overlook experts' relational and structural information encoded in the expert collaboration graph and, thus, fall short of capturing complex inter-dependencies among experts and their associated skills within teams. Moreover, the skills' dense vectors are pretrained disjointly and independently of the underlying neural classifier, hence, preventing end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose to reformulate the team recommendation problem into end-to-end link predictions in the expert collaboration graph to consume multi-hop intra-team and cross-team collaborations among experts while eschewing the unnecessary complexities of the disjoint two-phase training procedure. Our experiments on two large-scale datasets from various domains with distinct distributions of skills in teams demonstrate the superiority of the end-to-end approach and establish a new state of the art. Our code is available at https://github.com/fani-lab/OpeNTF.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Marginal Expected Revenue for Jointly Ranking Auction and Fixed-Price Listings in E-Commerce Sponsored Search

E-commerce search ranking must balance multiple objectives--relevance, user engagement, and platform revenue--when allocating impression slots to competing listings. Estimating the expected revenue component is well understood for fixed-price items, but becomes challenging when marketplace inventory includes mixed listing formats such as pure auctions and hybrid "Auction with Buy It Now" (ABIN) items, where prices evolve dynamically and the final transaction value is unknown at ranking time. Yet auction and ABIN listings account for a meaningful share of inventory and transaction volume on platforms such as eBay, and are a popular format for individual sellers and for unique items with unclear value. We extend the standard Expected Cost-per-Mille (eCPM) framework to auction and ABIN listings by deriving a marginal eCPM (meCPM) that captures the incremental value of showing one more impression of an item whose price is still evolving. The resulting formulation extends the familiar fixed-price eCPM--which is already inherently marginal--to auction dynamics, allowing unified ranking of fixed-price, auction, and ABIN listings under a single objective. We then describe a practical production implementation that approximates this objective, addressing cold-start challenges by bootstrapping from existing engagement models. Online A/B tests at a large e-commerce platform showed positive revenue gains and statistically significant improvements to user metrics, and the system was deployed to production.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

The Utility of LLMs in Recommender Systems Explanation Evaluation

Explanations play a crucial role in creating trustworthy recommender systems (RS), yet choosing a good explanation method presents challenges. Many explanation methods exist, but little guidance exists on which is best for which setting. Existing explanation generation methods often produce abstract outputs that require further formatting to become user-friendly, with a seemingly endless pool of options. Running user-based evaluations of all possible options is usually unfeasible, while automated evaluation metrics often either assess only the explainer's abstract output or require comparison with a ground truth, which is generally unavailable. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can serve as ``judges'' for explanation evaluation, but their reliability has not yet been thoroughly explored. This paper studies the utility of LLMs in selecting an effective explanation method for a given application. We first explore their ability to generate explanation prototypes given varying information about the RS and the user. Specifically, we generate 18 distinct explanation prototypes, which are subsequently evaluated by 14 LLMs of varying sizes across two temperature settings. We compare these against human ratings derived from a user study. Our results show that while LLMs exhibit human-like rating patterns and achieve moderate rank correlation with human raters, their absolute rating agreement is low and varies substantially by model size and evaluation construct. We derive four practical recommendations: keep explanation-generation prompts concise, prefer larger models for evaluation, pre-test evaluation constructs, and audit explanations for factual accuracy, as neither humans nor LLMs reliably detect non-factual content.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

RecEvolve: A Knowledge-Driven Autonomous Agent System for Recommender Systems

The rise of agentic AI has catalyzed a shift toward self-iterating systems, opening new frontiers for the autonomous optimization of production recommender models. This paper presents the empirical validation of a knowledge-driven autonomous agent system, deployed directly on a production large-scale Two-Tower retrieval model. By delegating the entire research lifecycle, spanning idea generation, code implementation, offline training, and metric evaluation, to a continuous closed-loop autonomous framework, the agent system executed over 40 completed autonomous training runs from scratch. Executing these runs under rigorous production-scale evaluations, the system systematically navigated hidden architectural bottlenecks on the latest production model to achieve a breakthrough ~20% relative improvement in NDCG, a gain that translated directly to a +3.77% increase in user satisfaction in live production traffic. Furthermore, the deployment exposed critical vulnerabilities in standard evaluation protocols, as the agent system autonomously discovered reward-hacking shortcuts. These findings prove that an autonomous pipeline can dramatically accelerate the pace of machine learning research and stress-test the rigorousness of underlying experimental infrastructure, while also exposing novel challenges such as reward hacking and redundant exploration of failed hypotheses.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

When Literature Data Mislead Artificial Intelligence in Materials Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly treats scientific literature as a data source for building databases, training predictive models, and guiding discovery. Yet literature-derived datasets often assume that reported experimental values are internally consistent and directly reusable. Here, we analyze this assumption using solid electrolyte (SE) conductivity data as a representative materials-science case. By tracing values from source articles to curated datasets, we identify recurrent text-figure mismatches, ambiguous axis annotations, unit inconsistencies, and missing measurement context. These discrepancies are often numerically plausible and therefore difficult to detect through routine preprocessing, but they can propagate as structured label noise during database construction and machine-learning reuse. A cross-database example shows how ambiguous reporting can create a 100-fold conductivity error. Our analysis reframes data accuracy as an infrastructure requirement for artificial-intelligence-driven discovery and motivates traceable reporting, curation, and validation practices for reusable scientific data. Keywords: AI for science; Data reliability; Scientific databases; Structured label noise; Literature-derived data; Materials informatics; Solid electrolytes

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

CHSR-RRF: A curriculum-gated hybrid retrieval framework with reciprocal rank fusion and leakage-aware benchmarking for educational RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly used in educational question answering, but standard retrievers optimize topical relevance without enforcing curriculum validity. In school settings, a passage can be relevant yet inappropriate if it comes from the wrong subject, level, or examination context; we call this failure mode curriculum leakage. We present CHSR-RRF, a curriculum-gated hybrid retrieval framework that applies metadata constraints before retrieval, then combines sparse and dense search with reciprocal rank fusion and deterministic reranking. We also introduce CERB, a 126-case benchmark for curriculum-constrained retrieval with hierarchy-aware relevance labels and explicit leakage annotations. On a 61-case pilot, pre-retrieval gating reduces leakage by 4.6x ($p<0.001$) while preserving ranked recall, whereas applying the same constraints after retrieval collapses recall and exact-scope success to zero ($p=0.039$). A full-benchmark lower-bound analysis further shows that many remaining failures arise from corpus and metadata gaps rather than retrieval design alone. These results show that retrieval in structured educational domains should be treated as constrained selection, with validity enforced when the candidate pool is formed rather than after ranking.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

NLP-Driven Knowledge Extraction and Thematic Classification of Translated Ancient Indian Medical Texts

Ancient Indian medical texts like Sushruta Samhita have extensive information on diseases, treatments, and surgical techniques. Yet, their ancient format and use of intricate vocabulary pose difficulties in accessibility and systematic ordering. The research here utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods like Named Entity Recognition (NER), BERTopic modeling, and Knowledge Graph development in Neo4j to extract, categorize, and visualize important concepts based on translated versions. Thematic classification with BERTopic allows for the identification of the underlying medical topics, whereas NER supports the structured entity recognition of diseases, treatments, researchers, and medicinal plants. Graphbased network analysis with Neo4j also allows for the semantic representation of relationship among extracted entities, supporting knowledge retrieval and digital preservation. The findings illustrate how graph databases, topic modeling, and entity recognition facilitate the computational organization of Ayurveda's historical medical wisdom, closing the gap between the conventional texts and contemporary data-driven inquiry. The suggested method promotes historical text analysis, medical informatics, and digital humanities to make ancient Indian medical wisdom more accessible and understandable.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

R$^{2}$Adapter: A Routing and Rewriting Adapter for Efficient Hybrid RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a prevailing paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with non-parametric knowledge. Vanilla RAG efficiently handles simple queries but struggles with relational or multi-hop reasoning. Graph-based RAG alleviates this issue but incurs higher inference complexity and latency. In practice, user queries can differ significantly in their complexity, rendering a fixed RAG strategy suboptimal. However, existing hybrid text-graph RAG methods typically rely on heuristic and LLM-based routing, resulting in unnecessary overhead and strong dependence on the underlying LLM. To address these challenges, we propose R$^{2}$Adapter, a lightweight plug-in Routing and Rewriting Adapter designed to allocate queries between vanilla and graph-based RAG dynamically. By routing only the queries that genuinely benefit from graph-based reasoning, R$^{2}$Adapter reduces unnecessary graph retrieval overhead. Additionally, uncertain graph-routed queries are rewritten to better expose their multi-hop reasoning requirements, improving retrieval quality without additional supervision. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that R$^{2}$Adapter reduces graph-based RAG usage by up to 59% while maintaining comparable answer accuracy. This adapter is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into diverse vanilla and graph-based RAG pipelines, providing an efficient and adaptive solution for hybrid RAG systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Incident Memory: Training-Free Operational Memory through Sequential Pattern Mining and Velocity-Stratified Retrieval

Incident response is a memory problem: teams accumulate tickets, traces, postmortems, and wiki pages, but the knowledge needed for the next incident is rarely stored with its order, freshness, and provenance intact. We present Incident Memory, a deterministic system that accumulates operational knowledge without model training. It combines (i) velocity-stratified retrieval, which ages structural, behavioral, contextual, and ephemeral facts at different rates; (ii) fingerprint-conditioned PrefixSpan mining, which extracts ordered playbooks from successful investigations; and (iii) provenance-aware metric definitions, which detect conflicting definitions through executable checks. On the UCI ITSM event log, containing 141,712 events across 24,918 incidents, Incident Memory extracts 23,110 ordered traces, mines 39 playbooks, and covers 84.3% of 6,934 held-out incidents. On controlled benchmarks with known ground truth, it achieves 99.2% ordered playbook precision (controlled), an architectural staleness guarantee versus 36% stale returns for a flat baseline, and conflict-detection F1 of 0.876. A direct Claude Haiku baseline on 19 fingerprint groups reaches 0.661 ordered precision, compared with 0.985 for PrefixSpan. The central result is not that language models are weak at incident response; it is that repeated incident histories are low-entropy once conditioned on fingerprint and previous action. In that regime, exact memory is a stronger primitive than open-ended generation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Knowledge Graph Expansion, RRF Fusion, and Per-Chunk Grounded Evaluation for Enterprise Document Search

Getting accurate, grounded answers out of large enterprise document repositories is a difficult problem. Dense vector retrieval alone frequently performs poorly on queries that mix technical terminology, vendor-specific acronyms, or require reasoning across several non-adjacent sections. DocuSearch was built to address exactly this gap - an offline, multi-agent document intelligence system developed and evaluated in a production telecom network operations environment. Rather than relying on a single retrieval signal, DocuSearch pulls together three complementary sources of evidence: semantic search over a Qdrant vector store using BGE-Large embeddings, BM25 full text search over an SQLite FTS5 index, and Knowledge Graph neighbour expansion from a structured edge table. These three ranked lists are merged through Reciprocal Rank Fusion with signal weights of 0.50 for vector search, 0.35 for BM25, and 0.15 for the knowledge graph, using a smoothing constant of 60 to stabilize scores. A cross-encoder then reranks the fused list, and Maximal Marginal Relevance with a balance factor of 0.65 prunes results for relevance and diversity. What makes DocuSearch distinctive is a per-chunk evaluation loop treating each chunk as its own mini-retrieval problem: an LLM decides whether the chunk needs more context, whether it fully answers the query, and whether the answer is grounded in retrieved text. Ungrounded answers are not returned; the system falls back to a multi-chunk merge instead. On a telecom corpus, DocuSearch reaches Precision@10 of 0.69, Recall@10 of 0.79, and a grounding rate of 89.6% - gains of 15, 16, and 18.4 percentage points over a dense-only RAG baseline. Index Terms: retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graph, reciprocal rank fusion, enterprise document search, agentic evaluation, BM25, cross-encoder reranking, on-premise deployment, LangGraph, telecom AI.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Efficient Cloud Knowledge Base Search in Telecom SNOC Environment

Telecom Service and Network Operations Centers (SNOCs) rely on large collections of cloud documents, including Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), vendor technical manuals, incident reports, and configuration guides, to maintain uninterrupted network operations. During critical incidents, engineers must quickly retrieve accurate information, yet traditional keyword based and single stage retrieval approaches often struggle to provide precise results. This paper presents Athena for Cloud Knowledge Base, a fully offline, multi agent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for enterprise cloud document search in Vodafone Idea's SNOC environment. The system integrates dense retrieval using E5 Large V2 embeddings, BM25 sparse retrieval, and Knowledge Graph expansion within a LangGraph based orchestration framework. Retrieved candidates are fused using Weighted CombSUM, followed by cross encoder reranking and Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to obtain a diverse and relevant evidence set. To improve answer reliability, the framework performs per chunk LLM evaluation with explicit attribution verification, assessing each MMR selected chunk independently before generating a response. Unsupported or weak evidence is discarded, and if no chunk satisfies the verification criteria, the system automatically evaluates multiple chunks together as a fallback. Experiments on a corpus of 4200 SNOC cloud documents containing 312000 indexed chunks show that the proposed approach achieves an MRR at 10 of 0.910 and an Exact Match (EM) score of 78.4 percent, outperforming single stage dense retrieval by 14.6 percentage points. The entire pipeline operates in a fully offline environment, satisfying enterprise data sovereignty requirements while delivering accurate and grounded responses for cloud document search.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

MGDiff: Multi-Interest Sequence Recommendation with Masking GNN-Guided Diffusion

We propose a novel Multi-Interest Sequence Recommendation Framework with \underline{M}asking \underline{G}NN-Guided \underline{Diff}usion Model (MGDiff), designed to generate accurate, bias-free user interest information during the diffusion process. First, we propose a semantics-enhanced Dual-layer Semantic Guidance (DSG) framework, which decomposes guidance into two synergistic stages: extracting latent item semantics and decoupling multidimensional user intent. We design a Weight-adaptive Masking Graph Neural Network reconstructs missing links to uncover deep item relationships beyond superficial co-occurrence, while a Dynamic Multi-Expert Network projects user preferences into distinct semantic subspaces to suppress irrelevant interference. This hierarchical design yields structured guidance that significantly improves the generation accuracy of diffusion models. Second, We propose a Popularity-Aware Guidance (PAG) mechanism that performs spatial geometric adjustments on the outputs of diffusion models: by using item popularity as a differentiable adjustment signal to recalibrate similarity metrics, we enable DMs to generate diverse recommendations free from popularity bias. Finally, we compare MGDiff with multiple baseline models across four widely used datasets, demonstrating its superior performance and validating its effectiveness.

cs.IR↗