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arXiv2026

What Are You Listening to? Temporal Music Grounding for Audio-to-Text Large Language Models

Large audio-language models can produce fluent and musically plausible responses, yet it often remains unclear whether those responses are grounded in the audio input. We introduce temporal music grounding, a task in which a model returns one or more time spans corresponding to a queried musical note, event, or pattern. To evaluate this capability, we present MusicGroundingBench, a controlled benchmark suite built by rendering algorithmically generated piano MIDI to audio, yielding exact symbolic-to-audio alignment. The suite comprises two subsets: MGBench-3N, which evaluates note-level grounding in clips containing up to three notes, and MGBench-2B, which evaluates structured grounding and short-form music understanding in two-bar excerpts. Experiments show that temporal music grounding remains challenging for current audio-language models, whereas task-specific training yields substantial gains. We further report exploratory evidence on the relationship between grounding supervision and music understanding. These results establish MusicGroundingBench as a controlled testbed for assessing whether audio-language models ground their responses in temporally localized musical evidence.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

TAAL: Mitigating Early Beam Pruning in Generative Recommendation via Temporal Autoregressive Alignment

Generative recommendation encodes items as hierarchical semantic identifiers (SIDs) and retrieves the next item through autoregressive decoding. Standard next-token prediction, however, does not explicitly cover the multimodal transitions present in interaction sequences, leaving the ground-truth SID vulnerable to irreversible pruning at early beam-search branches. Across three public benchmarks, we find that 91.9\%--96.6\% of retrieval failures occur within the first two decoding steps. We therefore propose Temporal Autoregressive Alignment (TAAL). During training, TAAL constructs a joint $(c_1,c_2)$ soft target from historical transitions and aligns the early-prefix distribution with a forward KL objective. During inference, it calibrates candidate scores with pointwise mutual information (PMI) to reduce the influence of globally frequent prefixes. On Amazon Beauty, Instruments, and Yelp, TAAL improves NDCG@10 over the standard baseline by 39.5\%, 6.7\%, and 28.6\%, respectively, while increasing full-SID survival by 3.9\%--16.6\%. Beam-width analysis further shows that the relative survival gain grows as the beam narrows, reaching 39.4\% at $B=5$.

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

Answer Bubbles: Information Exposure in AI-Mediated Search

Generative search systems are increasingly replacing link-based retrieval with AI-generated summaries, yet little is known about how these systems differ in sources, language, and fidelity to cited material. We examine responses to 11,000 real search queries across five systems---vanilla GPT, Search GPT, Perplexity Search with Grok, Google AI Overviews, and traditional Google Search---at three levels: source diversity, linguistic characterization of the generated summary, and source-summary fidelity. We find that generative search systems exhibit significant \textit{source-selection} biases in their citations, favoring certain sources over others. Incorporating search also selectively attenuates epistemic markers, reducing hedging by up to 60\% while preserving confidence language in the AI-generated summaries. At the same time, AI summaries further compound the citation biases: Wikipedia and longer sources are disproportionately overrepresented, whereas cited social media content and negatively framed sources are substantially underrepresented. Our findings highlight the potential for \textit{answer bubbles}, in which identical queries yield structurally different information realities across systems, with implications for user trust, source visibility, and the transparency of AI-mediated information access.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Semantic IDs: Encoding Business-Value Ranking into Document Identifiers for Generative Retrieval

Generative Retrieval (GR) formulates retrieval as a sequence-to-sequence generation task, assigning each document a document identifier (DocID) and retrieving it through autoregressive decoding, making DocID design a critical factor in retrieval quality. However, existing schemes based on discrete representation learning suffer from inherent collision issues and create a mismatch between the DocID's encoding objective and the system's business optimization target. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Cluster-Ranked Identifier (CRID)}, which decouples DocID into \textit{semantic clustering} and \textit{business-value ranking}, yielding collision-free identifiers that support incremental updates via intra-cluster reranking. We further introduce an analytical framework that decomposes retrieval gains into \textit{personalized preference} and \textit{statistical prior} generalization, revealing how semantic cluster size governs the balance between the two components. Experiments on a Taobao e-commerce corpus of over 300M items show that CRID surpasses the strongest embedding-based retrieval baseline on top-K Hitrate, and delivers +1.06\% GMV in full-traffic deployment.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Spatial Matryoshka Training for Multi-Granularity Visual Document Retrieval

Multi-modal late-interaction retrievers achieve strong retrieval on visually rich documents by representing each page as per patch embeddings and matching at the token level. However, this approach incurs high storage costs. Existing compression methods typically fix a single compression level at indexing time, limiting flexibility. We present ColSNAP (Spatial Nested Average Pooling)1, a training method that generates a nested hierarchy of compression levels directly from a backbone's patch grid. By spatially pooling patch embeddings into pro- gressively coarser tiers and training all tiers simultaneously, a single model learns to support retrieval at multiple compression levels without architectural changes. Crucially, a single encoding pass yields every tier, enabling the accuracy-storage trade-off to be configured at indexing time to match avail- able storage budgets, rather than being fixed during training. We demonstrate that models trained using ColSNAP maintain near full-resolution retrieval performance under substantial compression and that ColSNAP transfers effectively across multiple late-interaction backbones, and achieves most of its improvements via a lightweight adaptation stage applied to a pre-trained retriever.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

SearchLog: A Web Browser Extension for Capturing Search Logs in Laboratory Studies

Natural search logs are valuable for studying search behavior in information seeking settings. We present SearchLog, an easy-to-install web browser extension for collecting natural search logs during lab-based studies. SearchLog enables participants to search the open web in a browser while recording structured interaction data from the mouse, keyboard, search activity, and browser state modules. The extension captures clicks, scrolling, hovered text, typed words, search queries, result rankings, AI-generated summaries when available, tab activity, and window changes. A local Flask backend stores each session as an ordered JSON event stream, including HTML snapshots and preprocessed search result data for later analysis. These logs can be used to derive measures such as query reformulation, page visits, dwell time, scroll behavior, tab switching, search path complexity, and exposure to AI-generated search content. By supporting natural browser-based search with structured experimental metadata, SearchLog provides a reusable resource to study search behavior across traditional and AI-enhanced search interfaces. SearchLog is available at https://github.com/peanutH/SearchLog-chromium-extension.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Evaluating Perspectival Biases in Cross-Modal Retrieval

Multimodal retrieval systems are expected to operate in a semantic space, agnostic to the language or cultural origin of the query. In practice, however, retrieval outcomes systematically reflect perspectival biases: deviations shaped by linguistic prevalence and cultural associations. We introduce the Cross-Cultural, Cross-Modal, Cross-lingual Multimodal (3XCM) benchmark to isolate these effects. Results from our studies indicate that, for image-to-text retrieval, models tend to favor entries from prevalent languages over those that are semantically faithful. For text-to-image retrieval, we observe a consistent "tugging effect" in the joint embedding space between semantic alignment and language-conditioned cultural association. When semantic representations are insufficiently resolved, particularly in low-resource languages, similarity is increasingly governed by culturally familiar visual patterns, leading to systematic association bias in retrieval. Our findings suggest that achieving equitable multimodal retrieval necessitates targeted strategies that explicitly decouple language from culture, rather than relying solely on broader data exposure. This work highlights the need to treat linguistic and cultural biases as distinct, measurable challenges in multimodal representation learning.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Accurate Plate Reverb Parameter Estimation Using Two-Stage Evolutionary Search

We describe our submission to Task A of the 1st DAFx parameter estimation challenge. The task is to recover the six physical parameters of a simulated metal-plate reverberator -- its dimensions and material properties -- from a single impulse response (IR). We treat this as a black-box optimization: candidate parameter sets are fed to the simulator and scored by a loss against the target IR. The method has two stages. The first uses CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimizer, to recover five of the six parameters, comparing IRs under an amplitude-normalized loss. Amplitude normalization makes the search robust but discards the cue to the sixth parameter, the plate's surface density; a second stage therefore estimates it alone, with a ternary search on the un-normalized loss. As the choice of loss strongly affects the search, we select it beforehand, and analyze why compression in the common multi-scale spectral loss degrades recovery. Finally, we test our method on a validation set of 50 IRs, discuss a pathological failure mode, and ablate to justify having two different stages instead of a unified CMA-ES search.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

An Empirical Evaluation of Cross-City POI Recommendation on a Large-Scale Benchmark

Cross-city point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is crucial for navigating unfamiliar urban environments, yet its progress has historically been constrained by data limitations. Using the recently proposed large-scale benchmark Trip World, we empirically re-examine whether conclusions drawn on small prior benchmarks still hold under worldwide coverage, low home-destination region overlap, and large, semantically rich POI inventories. Our evaluation surfaces three bottlenecks of representative state-of-the-art methods: (1) hometown-aware models appear to rely more on destination-region priors than on user-specific preference transfer; (2) their accuracy-efficiency trade-off degrades at this scale, where the simplest model is among the strongest; and (3) existing mechanisms for integrating semantic metadata yield little benefit. We further include a diagnostic pilot on agentic methods adapted from next-POI recommendation, finding that naive adaptation trails a simple popularity prior even though the relevant semantic signal is present in the data. These results highlight the need for task-specific designs that support cross-city preference transfer, semantic grounding, and scalable reasoning over unseen destination inventories.

cs.AI↗
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

Learning Personalized Prompts for Healthcare Guidance

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed many industries, including healthcare. In practice, hospitals and patients increasingly seek LLM-based systems capable of interpreting personal health records and providing healthcare guidance. However, existing approaches mainly rely on general medical knowledge and often fail to account for individual variability, limiting their ability to provide personalized guidance. To address this, we propose personalized prompt learning (PPL), a framework that learns individualized prompts to guide LLMs in generating personalized healthcare recommendations. PPL constructs initial personalized prompts by leveraging both self-informed patient information and peer-informed signals derived from clinically similar cases. These prompts are then refined using reinforcement learning (RL) to better align the generated responses with physician recommendations written for each patient. PPL operates with hard prompts, enabling seamless integration with proprietary LLMs without modifying the underlying models. We evaluate PPL on real-world obstetrics and gynecology data. The results show that our approach produces more personalized healthcare guidance and wins 97 out of 100 comparisons in expert evaluation, demonstrating its potential for broader healthcare applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CGCL-codes/PPL.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CORE-T: COherent REtrieval of Tables for Text-to-SQL

Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes a key bottleneck for end-to-end performance. We study an open-book setting where queries must be answered over large, heterogeneous table collections pooled from many sources, without clean scoping signals such as database identifiers. Here, dense retrieval (DR) achieves high recall but returns many distractors, while join-aware alternatives often rely on extra assumptions and/or incur high inference overhead. We propose CORE-T, a scalable, training-free framework that enriches tables with LLM-generated purpose metadata and pre-computes a lightweight table-compatibility cache. At inference time, DR returns top-K candidates; a single LLM call selects a coherent, joinable subset, and a two-step additive adjustment stage restores strongly compatible tables. Across Bird, Spider, MMQA, and Beaver, CORE-T improves over DR by up to 22.7 points in table-selection F1 while returning up to 40% fewer tables, and by up to 24.4 points in multi-table execution accuracy, and uses 1.64-4.20x fewer total selection tokens than LLM-intensive baselines.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Evidence Absence Is Not Evidence Insufficiency: Diagnosing NEI Construction Artifacts in Fact Verification

Evidence absence is not evidence insufficiency, but fact verification benchmarks can make them observationally similar. The Not Enough Information (NEI) label is often operationalized through constructed evidence conditions, and that choice silently determines what a verifier learns. We introduce NEI-CAP, a construction-aware diagnostic protocol for insufficient-evidence evaluation. Each NEI example carries the construction family that produced it; NEI-CAP audits shortcut cues, validates hard cases through human adjudication, and tests whether competence transfers across constructions. We instantiate the protocol on SciFact, with FEVER and HoVer as bounded external controls. Across these settings, NEI competence does not transfer reliably: encoder verifiers and an instruction-tuned decoder trained on shortcut-prone constructions fail to recognize semantically related insufficient evidence, and mixed-construction training narrows but does not close the gap. Fixed-claim diagnostics further show that the evidence condition shifts confidence in the reference Support/Refute label, not only NEI recall, so an aggregate NEI score can hide which problem a model has actually solved. We therefore recommend reporting the construction family alongside the score, and distill the results into a checklist for benchmarks that carry an insufficient-evidence label.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

LLMs Interpret, Embeddings Organize, Graphs Emerge: Agent-Driven Compilation of Scientific Knowledge

Sustained scientific work requires a knowledge substrate that carries interpretation across tasks and preserves paths to source evidence. We call this process \emph{scientific knowledge compilation} and implement it in ASKS, the \emph{Agent-Driven Scientific Knowledge System}. For each source, an LLM produces a readable Wiki view and machine-facing semantics. Deterministic checks convert the latter into a document-local GraphDelta, and embedding geometry together with explicit graph rules integrates the proposed changes into persistent state. Each ingest is an inspectable state transition over accumulated knowledge, with compiled Wiki and graph views linked to the preserved source record. We examine this process by chronologically compiling 56 published papers from one research program. Branch survival, cross-paper support, lineage, coverage, and churn yield a source-traceable author research portrait centered on tensor-network methods, with branches into quantum many-body research, tensor-network machine learning, and quantum-AI-oriented directions. In this run, higher-level Hub organization remains stable and low-churn. Canonical-node growth is predominantly additive. Graph-level measurements and navigation paths retain links to the source records from which they were compiled.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

You Know What I Mean: A Benchmark for Agentic Conversational Reference Grounding

Collaborative conversations frequently contain references whose targets are indirect rather than named: resolving "this looks like the fix discussed yesterday" requires combining conversational context with evidence from the surrounding workspace which is accessible through APIs or user interfaces. We formalize this problem as Conversational Reference Grounding (CoRG): using a given set of tools to resolve a reference in conversation to the unique external item intended by the speaker. CoRG is challenging because it combines lexical, semantic, and temporal cues distributed across the conversation and the external workspace. Agents must translate these heterogeneous signals into effective tool use: formulating strategies, discovering plausible candidates, inspecting their metadata and content, and ruling out close alternatives. We study CoRG through RepoRef, a benchmark of 400 developer-chat segments grounded in GitHub issues, pull requests, and commits across 92 repositories. Unlike single-shot retrieval tasks, RepoRef often requires multi-step tool use. Our results show that CoRG remains challenging for current agents, even the best agent reaches only 67.0% success rate, leaving one third of references unresolved. These findings position CoRG as a concrete benchmark for studying how agents search, inspect, and verify information in realistic multi-tool environments.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Mine and Refine: Optimizing Graded Relevance in E-commerce Semantic Search Retrieval

Embedding-based retrieval (EBR) for large-scale e-commerce search faces three intertwined challenges: graded (non-binary) relevance where engagement signals are noisy and intent-varying while business relevance guidelines admit acceptable-but-not-exact matches, false negatives in hard sample mining, and unstable similarity score separability across relevance levels, the last of which complicates hybrid search score fusion and downstream ranking. We propose Mine and Refine, a two-stage contrastive training framework that addresses all three. A lightweight LLM, fine-tuned with engagement-driven audit, serves as a guideline-aligned scalable labeler throughout training. Stage 1 establishes a robust global embedding space via label-aware supervised contrastive learning; Stage 2 mines hard samples, re-annotates them with the LLM labeler to mitigate spurious negatives, and refines the model through a multi-level extension of circle loss that enforces margin-controlled separation across relevance levels. Deployed in production e-commerce search across multiple product verticals, the approach delivers statistically significant lifts in user engagement and gross order value, and substantially improves retrieval and end-to-end relevance metrics.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Information-Guided Selective Modality-Interest Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation (MMRec) aims to enhance recommendation performance by leveraging rich item content from multiple modalities. However, directly incorporating all modality information does not necessarily lead to better preference modeling, since user interests are often more related to a subset of modality signals, while other signals may be weakly aligned with user preferences or even introduce noise. Although recent MMRec methods improve modality utilization through invariant learning, attention mechanisms, graph refinement, or contrastive learning, their alignment processes are often implicit or heuristic and lack a clear objective for selecting modality signals that better match user interests. In this paper, we propose AMUR, an information-guided selective modality-interest alignment framework for multimodal recommendation. Inspired by an information-theoretic view, AMUR aims to enhance modality information that is more related to user interests while reducing the influence of less aligned signals. Specifically, AMUR first refines modality graph structures towards user behavior, and then selectively aligns shared interest-related semantics across modalities. This enables AMUR to improve modality-interest alignment while preserving useful modality-specific complementary information. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AMUR over competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/Wenze1/AMUR.

cs.IR↗