Despite recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for video understanding, effectively understanding long-form video content remains underexplored due to the vast scale and high complexity of video data. Current RAG approaches typically segment videos into fixed-length chunks, which often disrupts the continuity of contextual information and fails to capture authentic scene boundaries. Inspired by the human ability to naturally organize continuous experiences into coherent scenes, we present SceneRAG, a unified framework that leverages large language models to segment videos into narrative-consistent scenes by processing ASR transcripts alongside temporal metadata. SceneRAG further sharpens these initial boundaries through lightweight heuristics and iterative correction. For each scene, the framework fuses information from both visual and textual modalities to extract entity relations and dynamically builds a knowledge graph, enabling robust multi-hop retrieval and generation that account for long-range dependencies. Experiments on the LongerVideos benchmark, featuring over 134 hours of diverse content, confirm that SceneRAG substantially outperforms prior baselines, achieving a win rate of up to 72.5 percent on generation tasks.
Manual slide creation is labor-intensive and requires expert prior knowledge. Existing natural language-based LLM generation methods struggle to capture the visual and structural nuances of slide designs. To address this, we formalize the Reference Image to Slide Generation task and propose Slide2Code, the first benchmark with difficulty-tiered samples based on a novel Slide Complexity Metric. We introduce SlideCoder, a layout-aware, retrieval-augmented framework for generating editable slides from reference images. SlideCoder integrates a Color Gradient-based Segmentation algorithm and a Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to decompose complex tasks and enhance code generation. We also release SlideMaster, a 7B open-source model fine-tuned with improved reverse-engineered data. Experiments show that SlideCoder outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 40.5 points, demonstrating strong performance across layout fidelity, execution accuracy, and visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/vinsontang1/SlideCoder.
Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge. It leverages graphs to model the hierarchical structure between specific concepts, enabling more coherent and effective knowledge retrieval for accurate reasoning.Despite its conceptual promise, recent studies report that GraphRAG frequently underperforms vanilla RAG on many real-world tasks. This raises a critical question: Is GraphRAG really effective, and in which scenarios do graph structures provide measurable benefits for RAG systems? To address this, we propose GraphRAG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate GraphRAG models onboth hierarchical knowledge retrieval and deep contextual reasoning. GraphRAG-Bench features a comprehensive dataset with tasks of increasing difficulty, coveringfact retrieval, complex reasoning, contextual summarization, and creative generation, and a systematic evaluation across the entire pipeline, from graph constructionand knowledge retrieval to final generation. Leveraging this novel benchmark, we systematically investigate the conditions when GraphRAG surpasses traditional RAG and the underlying reasons for its success, offering guidelines for its practical application. All related resources and analyses are collected for the community at https://github.com/GraphRAG-Bench/GraphRAG-Benchmark.
Contract review is a complex and time-intensive task that typically demands specialized legal expertise, rendering it largely inaccessible to non-experts. Moreover, legal interpretation is rarely straightforward-ambiguity is pervasive, and judgments often hinge on subjective assessments. Compounding these challenges, contracts are usually confidential, restricting their use with proprietary models and necessitating reliance on open-source alternatives. To address these challenges, we introduce PAKTON: a fully open-source, end-to-end, multi-agent framework with plug-and-play capabilities. PAKTON is designed to handle the complexities of contract analysis through collaborative agent workflows and a novel retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) component, enabling automated legal document review that is more accessible, adaptable, and privacy-preserving. Experiments demonstrate that PAKTON outperforms both general-purpose and pretrained models in predictive accuracy, retrieval performance, explainability, completeness, and grounded justifications as evaluated through a human study and validated with automated metrics.
In this work, we tackle the problem of text-to-video retrieval (T2VR). Inspired by the success of late interaction techniques in text-document, text-image, and text-video retrieval, our approach, Video-ColBERT, introduces a simple and efficient mechanism for fine-grained similarity assessment between queries and videos. Video-ColBERT is built upon 3 main components: a fine-grained spatial and temporal token-wise interaction, query and visual expansions, and a dual sigmoid loss during training. We find that this interaction and training paradigm leads to strong individual, yet compatible, representations for encoding video content. These representations lead to increases in performance on common text-to-video retrieval benchmarks compared to other bi-encoder methods.
The parameter-efficient adaptation of the image-text pretraining model CLIP for video-text retrieval is a prominent area of research. While CLIP is focused on image-level vision-language matching, video-text retrieval demands comprehensive understanding at the video level. Three key discrepancies emerge in the transfer from image-level to video-level: vision, language, and alignment. However, existing methods mainly focus on vision while neglecting language and alignment. In this paper, we propose Discrepancy Reduction in Vision, Language, and Alignment (DiscoVLA), which simultaneously mitigates all three discrepancies. Specifically, we introduce Image-Video Features Fusion to integrate image-level and video-level features, effectively tackling both vision and language discrepancies. Additionally, we generate pseudo image captions to learn fine-grained image-level alignment. To mitigate alignment discrepancies, we propose Image-to-Video Alignment Distillation, which leverages image-level alignment knowledge to enhance video-level alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our DiscoVLA. In particular, on MSRVTT with CLIP (ViT-B/16), DiscoVLA outperforms previous methods by 1.5% in R@1, reaching a final score of 50.5% R@1. The code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/DsicoVLA.
Foundation models are an emerging research direction in tabular deep learning. Notably, TabPFNv2 recently claimed superior performance over traditional GBDT-based methods on small-scale datasets using an in-context learning paradigm, which does not adapt model parameters to target datasets. However, the optimal finetuning approach for adapting tabular foundational models, and how this adaptation reshapes their internal mechanisms, remains underexplored. While prior works studied finetuning for earlier foundational models, inconsistent findings and TabPFNv2's unique architecture necessitate fresh investigation. To address these questions, we first systematically evaluate various finetuning strategies on diverse datasets. Our findings establish full finetuning as the most practical solution for TabPFNv2 in terms of time-efficiency and effectiveness. We then investigate how finetuning alters TabPFNv2's inner mechanisms, drawing an analogy to retrieval-augmented models. We reveal that the success of finetuning stems from the fact that after gradient-based adaptation, the dot products of the query-representations of test objects and the key-representations of in-context training objects more accurately reflect their target similarity. This improved similarity allows finetuned TabPFNv2 to better approximate target dependency by appropriately weighting relevant in-context samples, improving the retrieval-based prediction logic. From the practical perspective, we managed to finetune TabPFNv2 on datasets with up to 50K objects, observing performance improvements on almost all tasks. More precisely, on academic datasets with I.I.D. splits, finetuning allows TabPFNv2 to achieve state-of-the-art results, while on datasets with gradual temporal shifts and rich feature sets, TabPFNv2 is less stable and prior methods remain better.
Retrieving homologous protein sequences is essential for a broad range of protein modeling tasks such as fitness prediction, protein design, structure modeling, and protein-protein interactions. Traditional workflows have relied on a two-step process: first retrieving homologs via Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA), then training models on one or more of these alignments. However, MSA-based retrieval is computationally expensive, struggles with highly divergent sequences or complex insertions & deletions patterns, and operates independently of the downstream modeling objective. We introduce Protriever, an end-to-end differentiable framework that learns to retrieve relevant homologs while simultaneously training for the target task. When applied to protein fitness prediction, Protriever achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to sequence-based models that rely on MSA-based homolog retrieval, while being two orders of magnitude faster through efficient vector search. Protriever is both architecture- and task-agnostic, and can flexibly adapt to different retrieval strategies and protein databases at inference time -- offering a scalable alternative to alignment-centric approaches.
Embedding-based search is widely used in applications such as recommendation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Recently, there is a growing demand to support these capabilities over personal data stored locally on devices. However, maintaining the necessary data structure associated with the embedding-based search is often infeasible due to its high storage overhead. For example, indexing 100 GB of raw data requires 150 to 700 GB of storage, making local deployment impractical. Reducing this overhead while maintaining search quality and latency becomes a critical challenge. In this paper, we present LEANN, a storage-efficient approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search index optimized for resource-constrained personal devices. LEANN combines a compact graph-based structure with an efficient on-the-fly recomputation strategy to enable fast and accurate retrieval with minimal storage overhead. Our evaluation shows that LEANN reduces index size to under 5% of the original raw data, achieving up to 50 times smaller storage than standard indexes, while maintaining 90% top-3 recall in under 2 seconds on real-world question answering benchmarks.
Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have demonstrated significant potential in handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, these models often struggle with unfaithfulness issues, generating outputs that either ignore the retrieved context or inconsistently blend it with the LLM`s parametric knowledge. This issue is particularly severe in cases of knowledge conflict, where the retrieved context conflicts with the model`s parametric knowledge. While existing faithful RAG approaches enforce strict context adherence through well-designed prompts or modified decoding strategies, our analysis reveals a critical limitation: they achieve faithfulness by forcibly suppressing the model`s parametric knowledge, which undermines the model`s internal knowledge structure and increases the risk of misinterpreting the context. To this end, this paper proposes FaithfulRAG, a novel framework that resolves knowledge conflicts by explicitly modeling discrepancies between the model`s parametric knowledge and retrieved context. Specifically, FaithfulRAG identifies conflicting knowledge at the fact level and designs a self-thinking process, allowing LLMs to reason about and integrate conflicting facts before generating responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https:// github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Faithful-RAG
Scientific reasoning requires not only long-chain reasoning processes, but also knowledge of domain-specific terminologies and adaptation to updated findings. To deal with these challenges for scientific reasoning, we introduce RAISE, a step-by-step retrieval-augmented framework which retrieves logically relevant documents from in-the-wild corpus. RAISE is divided into three steps: problem decomposition, logical query generation, and logical retrieval. We observe that RAISE consistently outperforms other baselines on scientific reasoning benchmarks. We analyze that unlike other baselines, RAISE retrieves documents that are not only similar in terms of the domain knowledge, but also documents logically more relevant.
Understanding cause and effect relationships remains a formidable challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in specialized domains where reasoning requires more than surface-level correlations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual accuracy, but standard RAG pipelines treat evidence as flat context, lacking the structure required to model true causal dependencies. We introduce Causal-Chain RAG (CC-RAG), a novel approach that integrates zero-shot triple extraction and theme-aware graph chaining into the RAG pipeline, enabling structured multi-hop inference. Given a domain specific corpus, CC-RAG constructs a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of <cause, relation, effect> triples and uses forward/backward chaining to guide structured answer generation. Experiments on two real-world domains: Bitcoin price fluctuations and Gaucher disease, show that CC-RAG outperforms standard RAG and zero-shot LLMs in chain similarity, information density, and lexical diversity. Both LLM-as-a-Judge and human evaluations consistently favor CC-RAG. Our results demonstrate that explicitly modeling causal structure enables LLMs to generate more accurate and interpretable responses, especially in specialized domains where flat retrieval fails.
Patients have long sought health information online, and increasingly, they are turning to generative AI to answer their health-related queries. Given the high stakes of the medical domain, techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and citation grounding have been widely promoted as methods to reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy of AI-generated responses and have been widely adopted into search engines. This paper argues that even when these methods produce literally accurate content drawn from source documents sans hallucinations, they can still be highly misleading. Patients may derive significantly different interpretations from AI-generated outputs than they would from reading the original source material, let alone consulting a knowledgeable clinician. Through a large-scale query analysis on topics including disputed diagnoses and procedure safety, we support our argument with quantitative and qualitative evidence of the suboptimal answers resulting from current systems. In particular, we highlight how these models tend to decontextualize facts, omit critical relevant sources, and reinforce patient misconceptions or biases. We propose a series of recommendations -- such as the incorporation of communication pragmatics and enhanced comprehension of source documents -- that could help mitigate these issues and extend beyond the medical domain.
Medical vision-language alignment through cross-modal contrastive learning shows promising performance in image-text matching tasks, such as retrieval and zero-shot classification. However, conventional cross-modal contrastive learning (CLIP-based) methods suffer from suboptimal visual representation capabilities, which also limits their effectiveness in vision-language alignment. In contrast, although the models pretrained via multimodal masked modeling struggle with direct cross-modal matching, they excel in visual representation. To address this contradiction, we propose ALTA (ALign Through Adapting), an efficient medical vision-language alignment method that utilizes only about 8% of the trainable parameters and less than 1/5 of the computational consumption required for masked record modeling. ALTA achieves superior performance in vision-language matching tasks like retrieval and zero-shot classification by adapting the pretrained vision model from masked record modeling. Additionally, we integrate temporal-multiview radiograph inputs to enhance the information consistency between radiographs and their corresponding descriptions in reports, further improving the vision-language alignment. Experimental evaluations show that ALTA outperforms the best-performing counterpart by over 4% absolute points in text-to-image accuracy and approximately 6% absolute points in image-to-text retrieval accuracy. The adaptation of vision-language models during efficient alignment also promotes better vision and language understanding. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/DopamineLcy/ALTA.
Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways. This variability is particularly valuable for in-the-wild multimodal retrieval, where the objective is to identify the corresponding representation in one modality given another modality as input. This challenge can be effectively framed as a feature alignment problem. For example, given a sentence encoded by a language model, retrieve the most semantically aligned image based on features produced by an image encoder, or vice versa. In this work, we first investigate the geometric relationships between visual and textual embeddings derived from both vision-language models and combined unimodal models. We then align these representations using four standard similarity metrics as well as two learned ones, implemented via neural networks. Our findings indicate that the Wasserstein distance can serve as an informative measure of the modality gap, while cosine similarity consistently outperforms alternative metrics in feature alignment tasks. Furthermore, we observe that conventional architectures such as multilayer perceptrons are insufficient for capturing the complex interactions between image and text representations. Our study offers novel insights and practical considerations for researchers working in multimodal information retrieval, particularly in real-world, cross-modal applications.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context language models (LCLMs) both address context limitations of LLMs in open-domain question answering (QA). However, optimal external context to retrieve remains an open problem: fixing the retrieval size risks either wasting tokens or omitting key evidence. Existing adaptive methods like Self-RAG and Self-Route rely on iterative LLM prompting and perform well on factoid QA, but struggle with aggregation QA, where the optimal context size is both unknown and variable. We present Adaptive-$k$ retrieval, a simple and effective single-pass method that adaptively selects the number of passages based on the distribution of the similarity scores between the query and the candidate passages. It does not require model fine-tuning, extra LLM inferences or changes to existing retriever-reader pipelines. On both factoid and aggregation QA benchmarks, Adaptive-$k$ matches or outperforms fixed-$k$ baselines while using up to 10x fewer tokens than full-context input, yet still retrieves 70% of relevant passages. It improves accuracy across five LCLMs and two embedding models, highlighting that dynamically adjusting context size leads to more efficient and accurate QA.
Information retrieval in Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly recognized as intertwined with generation capabilities rather than mere lookup. While longer contexts are often assumed to improve retrieval, the effects of intra-context interference remain understudied. To address this, we adapt the proactive interference (PI) paradigm from cognitive science, where earlier information disrupts recall of newer updates. In humans, susceptibility to such interference is inversely linked to working memory capacity. We introduce PI-LLM, an evaluation that sequentially streams semantically related key-value updates and queries only the final values. Although these final values are clearly positioned just before the query, LLM retrieval accuracy declines log-linearly toward zero as interference accumulates; errors arise from retrieving previously overwritten values. Attempts to mitigate interference via prompt engineering (e.g., instructing models to ignore earlier input) yield limited success. These findings reveal a fundamental constraint on LLMs' ability to disentangle interference and flexibly manipulate information, suggesting a working memory bottleneck beyond mere context access. This calls for approaches that strengthen models' ability to suppress irrelevant content during retrieval.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external evidence, yet it still falters when answers must be pieced together across semantically distant documents. We close this gap with the Hierarchical Lexical Graph (HLG), a three-tier index that (i) traces every atomic proposition to its source, (ii) clusters propositions into latent topics, and (iii) links entities and relations to expose cross-document paths. On top of HLG we build two complementary, plug-and-play retrievers: StatementGraphRAG, which performs fine-grained entity-aware beam search over propositions for high-precision factoid questions, and TopicGraphRAG, which selects coarse topics before expanding along entity links to supply broad yet relevant context for exploratory queries. Additionally, existing benchmarks lack the complexity required to rigorously evaluate multi-hop summarization systems, often focusing on single-document queries or limited datasets. To address this, we introduce a synthetic dataset generation pipeline that curates realistic, multi-document question-answer pairs, enabling robust evaluation of multi-hop retrieval systems. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform naive chunk-based RAG achieving an average relative improvement of 23.1% in retrieval recall and correctness. Open-source Python library is available at https://github.com/awslabs/graphrag-toolkit.
This paper aims to retrieve proteins with similar structures and semantics from large-scale protein dataset, facilitating the functional interpretation of protein structures derived by structural determination methods like cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM). Motivated by the recent progress of vision-language models (VLMs), we propose a CLIP-style framework for aligning 3D protein structures with functional annotations using contrastive learning. For model training, we propose a large-scale dataset of approximately 200,000 protein-caption pairs with rich functional descriptors. We evaluate our model in both in-domain and more challenging cross-database retrieval on Protein Data Bank (PDB) and Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) dataset, respectively. In both cases, our approach demonstrates promising zero-shot retrieval performance, highlighting the potential of multimodal foundation models for structure-function understanding in protein biology.
In natural language processing (NLP), the focus has shifted from encoder-only tiny language models like BERT to decoder-only large language models(LLMs) such as GPT-3. However, LLMs' practical application in the financial sector has revealed three limitations: (1) LLMs often perform worse than fine-tuned BERT on discriminative tasks despite costing much higher computational resources, such as market sentiment analysis in financial reports; (2) Application on generative tasks heavily relies on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) methods to provide current and specialized information, with general retrievers showing suboptimal performance on domain-specific retrieval tasks; (3) There are additional inadequacies in other feature-based scenarios, such as topic modeling. We introduce FinBERT2, a specialized bidirectional encoder pretrained on a high-quality, financial-specific corpus of 32b tokens. This represents the largest known Chinese financial pretraining corpus for models of this parameter size. As a better backbone, FinBERT2 can bridge the gap in the financial-specific deployment of LLMs through the following achievements: (1) Discriminative fine-tuned models (Fin-Labelers) outperform other (Fin)BERT variants by 0.4%-3.3% and leading LLMs by 9.7%-12.3% on average across five financial classification tasks. (2) Contrastive fine-tuned models (Fin-Retrievers) outperform both open-source (e.g., +6.8\% avg improvement over BGE-base-zh) and proprietary (e.g., +4.2\% avg improvement over OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large) embedders across five financial retrieval tasks; (3) Building on FinBERT2 variants, we construct the Fin-TopicModel, which enables superior clustering and topic representation for financial titles. Our work revisits financial BERT models through comparative analysis with contemporary LLMs and offers practical insights for effectively utilizing FinBERT in the LLMs era.