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arXiv2026

Group-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Evidence Navigation

Reasoning-intensive retrieval addresses queries whose relevance cannot be identified by surface-level matching, thereby requiring multi-step reasoning. Because relevant documents rarely appear in the initial candidate set, retrieval systems suffer from the bounded recall problem. Existing methods iteratively expand a candidate pool at the document level over a corpus graph, examining each neighbor in isolation and drifting toward a narrow region of the corpus. To address this problem, we propose Group-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Evidence Navigation (GAREN), which explores the corpus graph through group-level expansion. GAREN organizes documents into semantically coherent and distinguishable groups based on their connections in the corpus graph. The information in each group indicates what can be accessed by expanding through it, providing guidance beyond individual document-level signals. At each iteration, GAREN uses a group-level navigator to identify promising expansion directions, retrieves documents from the selected groups, and applies a document-level reranker to evaluate the updated candidate set. Extensive experiments show that GAREN achieves up to 8.0% improvement over the strongest baseline on BRIGHT. The source code is available at https://github.com/KJ12124/GAREN

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Counter-GEO-Bench: Evaluating Defenses Against Information-Distorting Generative Engine Optimization

Generative engine optimization (GEO) enables content producers to increase the visibility of their web pages in generative search engines, but the same techniques can deliver targeted misinformation when adversaries publish ordinary-looking GEO-optimized documents that victim large language models (LLMs) retrieve and synthesize into distorted answers. No existing benchmark evaluates defenses against this threat under controlled conditions. Therefore, we present Counter-GEO-Bench, a defense benchmark that pairs 247 human-verified, quality-gated queries with information-preserving and information-distorting GEO rewrites, and evaluates defenses on attack success rate (ASR), false positive rate, and answer quality across three victim LLMs. Under Counter-GEO-Bench, three off-the-shelf defenses (Granite Guardian, Llama Guard 3, and NeMo Self-Check Fact-Checking) reduce ASR by at most 5.7% relative, while Granite Guardian's reduction is not statistically significant. Safety-taxonomy guardrails target policy violations, while GEO misinformation passes through them as fluent informational content. To this end, a lightweight benchmark baseline, C-GEO Guard, is proposed, reducing ASR by 47.6% relative with near-zero utility loss, which proves threat tractable.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Test-Time Inference for Text2Cypher with Trace Budgeting and Selective Refinement

Large language models have enabled natural language interfaces for structured databases, but generated queries may still contain syntactic errors, violate database schemas, or fail during execution. Test-time inference strategies improve generation reliability without additional training, but existing approaches often use fixed inference budgets and uniform refinement strategies, leading to unnecessary computation across questions with different complexity levels. In this work, we investigate adaptive test-time inference for Text2Cypher and introduce two strategies: adaptive trace budgeting, which dynamically adjusts the candidate generation budget based on question difficulty, and selective execution-guided refinement, which applies correction only when additional inference is expected to be beneficial. Experiments on Gemma-2-9B and Qwen-2.5-7B show that adaptive trace budgeting reduces the average generation budget by 30.7% and wall-clock inference time by 21-25% while maintaining comparable generation quality. Selective refinement preserves nearly all execution success gains of full refinement, reducing execution success by only 0.2-0.5% while avoiding unnecessary refinement for simpler questions. Experiments show that a single correction model (Gemma-4) effectively refines outputs from a different model family, suggesting refinement transfers across families.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

MultiGhostBench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Long-Form LLM-Generated Text Attribution under Distribution Shifts

While existing work on LLM authorship attribution (AA) has made progress, available benchmarks remain limited, often focusing on English, controlled settings, or relatively outdated models, with the few multilingual studies considering only relatively short texts. We introduce MultiGhostBench, a multilingual benchmark comprising 928 books generated by five recent LLMs across six languages and three scripts, with an average length of approximately 59K words per book. The benchmark supports evaluation under domain, author, and language shifts. Evaluation of representative AA methods shows that no single method consistently performs best across settings, and performance generally degrades under distribution shifts. Transformer-based detectors can retain generator-related information across languages, although transfer effectiveness varies by language pair, whereas statistical and fingerprint-based detectors are more language-dependent. We envision MultiGhostBench as a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of robust AA methods. The dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/GrecoMT/MultiGhostBench.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Recommender System as Slow and Fast Thinkers

Sequential recommendation models are foundational to modern personalized services, yet their effectiveness varies substantially across heterogeneous user environments. In particular, static one-pass recommenders often perform well on common behavior patterns but degrade on operationally challenging user groups, such as users with longer histories or less mainstream item profiles. To address this limitation, we propose \textsc{DS-Frame}, an adaptive fast--slow inference framework for sequential recommendation. \textsc{DS-Frame} combines a Fast System for efficient routine prediction, a Slow System for iterative latent refinement, and a learned selector that routes each sample under a controllable computation budget. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that \textsc{DS-Frame} consistently improves representative sequential recommendation backbones, with larger gains on challenging groups and effective accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. This highlights the potential of adaptive inference for more efficient and robust recommendation. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZichenYuan233/Recommender-System-as-Slow-and-Fast-Thinkers}{this link}.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Incremental Pooled LLM Evaluation for Cost-Effective Retrieval Model Selection

Selecting a retrieval model for a production RAG system requires reliable comparative evaluation, but obtaining relevance judgments at scale is expensive and difficult to repeat as new candidate systems arrive. We study pooled LLM evaluation, in which an LLM judges the union of documents retrieved by the current set of candidate systems, and the pool is then expanded incrementally as new systems are introduced by judging only the new documents they contribute. These judgments are reused to evaluate all systems on a common basis. We validate this approach on four retrieval benchmarks with 11 systems spanning dense, sparse, and hybrid configurations, and deploy it to compare 62 retrieval configurations for a financial news QA system. Pooled LLM rankings correlate strongly with gold-standard evaluation across datasets, and 97% of pairwise system orderings are preserved once bootstrap uncertainty in the qrels is taken into account. In production, document overlap yields 65-80% judgment reuse and up to 4.9x lower evaluation cost, allowing teams to benchmark new retrieval candidates without re-judging previously assessed documents. These results suggest pooled LLM evaluation is a practical and cost-effective workflow for incremental retrieval model selection in deployed systems.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

Libraries and archives manage large collections with limited staff and computing budgets, yet common benchmarks do not systematically test their bibliographic work. They need to know which methods work for their tasks and what those methods require to run. SHELF, the Synthetic Harness for Evaluating LLM Fitness, addresses this gap. It is a Python system that turns labelled taxonomies, writing specifications, and a generation budget into controlled benchmark data and evaluation tasks. This first release contains 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies, with tasks for classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. We compare TF, TF-IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and, on subject classification only, zero-shot decoders; each method appears only on tasks that support it. Subject classification reaches 0.8887, while genre-form classification reaches only 0.2605, and several pair and clustering tasks remain near chance. Sparse methods remain competitive on classification, while TF-IDF is the fastest measured arm in the subject timing experiment. SHELF also varies bibliographic facets independently and can generate new, verifiably unseen documents after a model's training cutoff. Comparisons with LCSHBench and Project Gutenberg show that model rankings transfer more reliably than absolute scores, but SHELF scores do not estimate accuracy on production catalogue data. We release all source code and data under permissive licenses on GitHub and Hugging Face.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Corporate-Family Resolution Is Not a String-Matching Problem: A Public Benchmark Stratified by Name Visibility

Deciding whether two supplier records belong to the same corporate family is a prerequisite for spend consolidation, credit exposure aggregation and sanctions screening. It is usually treated as entity matching, but the tasks differ: a family link connects records that are deliberately different entities, and the evidence often appears in neither record. We introduce CorpFam, a public benchmark of 54,864 candidate pairs over 10,307 corporate families, derived from 6,638,350 US federal award records in which every supplier self-reports its ultimate parent to a government registry. Pairs are stratified by name visibility: whether the names are identical after normalisation, share a distinctive token, or share none. Because strata have positive rates from 10.2% to 97.3%, we report per-stratum recall, base-rate invariant, rather than F1, which is not. The strongest of 5 matchers recovers 100.0% of identical pairs and 4.2% of invisible ones; no method exceeds 4.7% on the latter. The failure begins before matching. Blocking decides which pairs a matcher sees, and we evaluate 7 schemes spanning phonetic keys, attribute keys that ignore the name, and semantic nearest neighbours. None reaches three percent on invisible pairs, and their union recovers 6.8%. 93.2% of these links never enter the candidate set, so no matching-stage improvement can reach them. The links are real: against SEC Exhibit 21 subsidiary schedules, which share no provenance with procurement registration, 64.2% of invisible links are corroborated, against 0.16% under permuted parents and 0.41% against the same parent's wrong exhibit: two unrelated nulls agreeing to within 0.25 points. Corporate-family resolution is a retrieval problem misfiled as a matching problem; the intervention point is candidate generation, not ranking. The benchmark, adjudication log, and code reproducing every number are released.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

Genuine Information Needs of Social Scientists Looking for Data

Publishing research data is widely expected to increase its reuse and to inspire new research. In the social sciences, data from surveys, interviews, polls, and statistics are primary resources for research. There is a long tradition to collect and offer research data in data archives and online repositories. Researchers use these systems to identify data relevant to their research. However, especially in data search, users' complex information needs seem to collide with the capabilities of data search systems. The search capabilities, in turn, depend to a high degree upon the metadata schemes used to describe the data. In this research, we conducted an online survey with 72 social science researchers who expressed their individual information needs for research data like they would do when asking a colleague for help. We analyzed these information needs and attributed their different components to the categories: topic, metadata, and intention. We compared these categories and their content to existing metadata models of research data and the search and filter opportunities offered in existing data search systems. We found a mismatch between what users have as a requirement for their data and what is offered on metadata level and search system possibilities.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Training seeds and model-selection stability in recommender-system evaluation

Recommender-system experiments often rely on a single random training seed, assuming that run-to-run stochasticity has limited impact on evaluation conclusions. This assumption is risky, as a training seed may influence several algorithm-dependent mechanisms, including parameter initialization, mini-batch ordering, dropout, masking, latent sampling, and training-time negative sampling. We examine this assumption by fixing the data partition and varying the training seed across hyperparameter configurations. We analyze seed effects at three levels: user-level metric sensitivity, validation-based model selection and recommendation-list agreement. Results show that seed variation is often detectable. Its impact depends on whether configurations are clearly separated, whether validation results transfer to test, and whether similar scores lead to similar top-$k$ lists. Findings suggest that reporting single-seed results can overstate the stability of recommender system evaluation, and that training seeds should be treated as part of the evaluation protocol rather than as incidental implementation noise.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

CaST-POI: Candidate-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Modeling for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation ranks a user's likely next location based on check-in history. Most recent rankers compress the trajectory into a single user vector and score every candidate through the same representation, ignoring that every candidate carries geographic coordinates and that the relevance of a past visit depends on where the candidate is located. Target attention from click-through-rate prediction conditions the user representation on the scored item, but its operator was developed for web items without geometry. This paper proposes CaST-POI, a candidate-conditioned POI ranker that keeps a standard target-attention reader and adds two bucketised biases to the attention logits: one for the recency of each past visit and another for its distance to the candidate being scored. Different candidates therefore read the same trajectory with different attention weights, grounded in real geographic distance rather than inferred from item embeddings. Comparing against seven sequential recommenders trained with the same split on three datasets NYC, TKY and CA under per-user leave-one-out with full-vocabulary ranking, CaST-POI improves MRR over the strongest baseline by 5.1%, 7.6% and 14.5%. Holm-corrected paired tests confirm the gains on TKY and CA. Ablation study locates the gain in the explicit revisit gate and the candidate-relative spatial bias, whereas the candidate-independent temporal bias has no measurable effect on all datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/CaST-POI.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Closing the Operational Gap in Semantic Caching

Semantic caching cuts LLM inference costs by serving a cached response to semantically similar queries. Standard practice evaluates these systems using PR-AUC, a metric that only measures how well scores rank and ignores whether they are usable at a fixed threshold. We show this mismatch leads to systematically poor deployment choices, as models with the highest PR-AUC are often the worst in operation. We introduce Precision--Cache Hit Ratio (P-CHR) AUC, a cache-aware metric that measures precision across cache utilization levels, and Operational Retention Rate (ORR), which captures how much offline ranking quality survives at deployment. We decompose the operational gap between offline and deployed quality into a recoverable threshold-utility component and an irreducible structural component fixed by the dataset's positive rate. Our experiments show that the threshold-utility gap is governed by the training objective rather than data scale, and yields only to re-normalizing scores over the candidate pool or changing the training objective. Ultimately, model selection for semantic caching is a threshold-utility problem, not a ranking one, and measuring it is the first step to closing the gap.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Field-Aware Agent Skill Retrieval

As lifelong learning agents accumulate lifelong growing skill banks, retrieving the correct skill becomes an increasingly important bottleneck. Most current skill retrieval methods treat each skill as one flat document by concatenating fields such as the name, description, and body. However, skills are naturally structured, multi-field objects, where each field provides different information about when and how the skill should be used. In this work, we study whether preserving this structure improves skill retrieval. We represent each skill as its separate components, and compute sparse and dense similarities for each field independently, exposing a naturally tensorized, field-aware representation of the skill bank. We then combine these field-level scores either with uniform weights or with a small learned MLP. Across two different skill retrieval benchmarks, SkillRet and SRA-Bench, we find that keeping fields separate improves hybrid retrieval, and learning over the field-level scores gives the strongest and most consistent results. Our field-aware MLP reaches $77.95$ Recall@10 on SkillRet and $83.78$ Recall@10 on SRA-Bench, outperforming the corresponding concatenated learned baselines. We also find that the advantage grows as the skill bank becomes larger, suggesting that field-aware skill retrieval becomes especially useful in the setting where retrieval is most difficult. Our results show that skill representation itself matters, and that simply preserving the structure already present in skill files can substantially improve retrieval.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Not Worth Another Token: Marginal Value Estimation for Efficient Deep Research Agents

Long-horizon research agents solve open-ended tasks through iterative retrieval, aggregation, and synthesis, but context grows rapidly while the marginal value of additional evidence often declines. This leads to unnecessary token cost, higher latency, and noisier inputs for final report generation. We study marginal value estimation for context management in deep research agents and present the first systematic stage-aware comparison of pruning strategies across the pipeline. We evaluate lightweight heuristic criteria and a learned value model at pre-retrieval, post-retrieval, and pre-synthesis stages. Our results show that pruning effectiveness depends more on where pruning is applied than on the specific scoring rule: early pruning yields the largest end-to-end savings, while later pruning mainly refines the final synthesis context. Lightweight heuristics reduce token usage by up to 73% with little quality degradation, learned pruning remains competitive on selected trade-offs, and no single method dominates across quality, efficiency, and faithfulness. These findings provide practical guidance for designing efficient long-horizon agentic systems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DCA-MoE: Spatially Adaptive Cross-Layer Fusion and Density-Routed Experts for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting must recover reliable local density under severe variations in perspective, head scale, occlusion, and background clutter. Although modern counting objectives provide strong spatial supervision, many multi-level decoders still use spatially invariant feature fusion and apply one receptive-field pattern to every location. We propose DCA-MoE, a framework that makes both decisions content dependent while retaining a frozen DINOv3 encoder. Spatially Adaptive Layer Fusion (SALF) predicts position-wise weights over four aligned backbone features, and Density-Routed Multi-Receptive-Field Experts (DR-MoE) assigns each location a soft mixture of local, mid-range, and large-context residual experts. An EBC-style head reconstructs block density, while DMCount supervision and an auxiliary routing-balance term train the decoder without updating the backbone. On the NWPU-Crowd validation split, the strongest paired configuration, based on DINOv3 ViT-L/16, obtains 31.7 MAE and 72.2 RMSE; the matched ViT-B/16 full model obtains a paired 32.2/75.9. Cross-dataset results remain mixed, and several component baselines currently report independently selected minima from a single seed. The evidence therefore supports the feasibility of spatially adaptive fusion and routing, while broader paired and multi-seed evaluation remains necessary for causal attribution.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Validating FKG.in: Soundness Assessment in LLM-Augmented Indian Food Knowledge

The online culinary ecosystem is increasingly populated by recipe content generated, modified, or summarized by Large Language Models (LLMs). While often plausible, such outputs may contain hallucinated ingredients, misrepresented quantities, or culturally implausible combinations, limiting their suitability for downstream applications and knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we present a semi-automated soundness assessment workflow for validating structured recipe data extracted and augmented by LLMs from informal culinary sources. Developed as part of FKG(.in), a knowledge graph of Indian food, the pipeline identifies and addresses common failure modes, including structural inconsistencies, semantic and logical incoherence, and deviations from the source text, through a multi-stage process combining formal grammars, vocabulary-based checks, statistical heuristics, Set Transformer-based coherence modeling, and retrieval-based verification. Although evaluated on Indian recipes, the proposed methods are applicable to broader multilingual and multicultural culinary domains. We provide a practical, auditable, and application-agnostic framework for validating LLM-augmented recipe data, thereby strengthening the foundations of machine-readable food knowledge infrastructures in the era of LLM-generated content.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

REIGN: Refurbished Embeddings with Integrated Guidance Networks for Efficient Context-Length Scaling

Dense retrieval over long documents is expensive. Token-level encoders scale quadratically in sequence length, and most long-context embedding models reach 32K tokens only through architectural workarounds or by stretching billion-parameter LLMs. We propose REIGN (Refurbished Embeddings with Integrated Guidance Networks), a contrastively trained bi-encoder that operates on sequences of contextualised chunk embeddings from a frozen Guidance Network (GN) rather than on raw tokens. REIGN targets multi-chunk inputs, primarily for document-to-document retrieval; single-chunk inputs stay with the GN. Decoupling token-level processing from document-level reasoning, and caching the GN embeddings to disk, cuts per-document training cost by roughly four orders of magnitude relative to chunked Transformer fine-tuning. We also release a synthetic long-document retrieval benchmark for contrastive training and evaluation at long context lengths. Across an in-distribution Wikipedia benchmark, the LoCo out-of-distribution suite, and a real-world patent retrieval case study, REIGN matches dense long-context retrievers at smaller parameter budgets in each regime. A paired significance test puts it on par with models 1.6-4.3x larger on the patent task, and it stays within 0.65 nDCG@10 of a 20x-larger model on LoCo.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

It Takes Two to Match: Co-Evolving Generative Retriever with Reinforcement Learning

Retrieval is the first stage of modern search and advertising systems, selecting a candidate set from a large item universe for downstream ranking and auction. Recent work increasingly leverages LLMs to improve retrieval through query expansion, data synthesis, and retrieval-feedback training. However, the generative component is typically used for query-side augmentation, while final matching is still delegated to a downstream retriever. We introduce CoGR, a retrieval framework that instead trains LLMs to directly construct retrieval representations on both query and item sides. Each generator produces a compact set of keywords, which are matched directly through an inverted index, preserving compatibility with existing keyword-based retrieval infrastructure. CoGR uses a two-stage training pipeline. Supervised fine-tuning first establishes an aligned keyword space, after which co-evolving reinforcement learning alternately optimizes the query- and item-side generators with GRPO against the opposite side's frozen index. Both sides optimize the same query-to-item retrieval $F_1$ objective: the query side receives retrieval $F_1$ directly, while the item side receives a counterfactual marginal reward measuring the change in query-side $F_1$ caused by its generated keywords. Across 10 representative sparse, dense, and generative baselines, CoGR achieves the best performance on both an internal APP Marketplace dataset and the public WANDS benchmark, improving $F_1$ over the strongest baseline by $10.9\%$ and $36.1\%$, respectively. Further analysis shows stable co-evolution and increasingly aligned query--item keyword spaces over training.

cs.IR↗