The Inference Report

Relevant evidence in Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) collections may be distributed across passages in different parts of a work, including verses, translations, and commentaries. Locating it requires matching natural-language questions and partially remembered verse fragments to source passages. We present Dhara, a retrieval engine combining hybrid search, chapter- and book-level Entity Notes (EN), Fuzzy Verse Retrieval (FVR), and neural reranking. Five comparisons on the 325 questions in Dhara Bench examine retrieval representations against BM25, EN's contribution, reranker quality and computation time, FVR, and Gemini. BGE-M3 single-vector retrieval exceeds BM25 in nDCG@10, Recall@20, and MRR@20 across all categories. Its scores are broadly comparable to ColBERTv2, with mean retrieval times of 0.108 s and 0.962 s under the same hardware configuration and a smaller memory footprint for chunk storage on disk. Adding EN to a direct branch with a matched candidate count improves nDCG@10 in all twelve categories with Qwen and ten with BGE; the combined ranking is capped at the same candidate count. Qwen improves nDCG@10, Precision@5, and MRR@20 over BGE in every category, at approximately 6.72 times the overall estimated serial computation time. FVR increases Verse-category nDCG@10 by approximately 20 percentage points with either reranker. Gemini is evaluated after source mapping and manual review with relevance annotations visible. The Qwen pipeline with EN and FVR has higher Recall@20 than Gemini in ten categories and stronger complete-evidence retrieval in Multi-hop questions, while Gemini retains early-relevance advantages in several categories. The results inform retrieval choices according to evidence requirements and resource budgets.

Recommendation systems have become more important since the widespread use of the Internet. The large amount of information means that it is difficult for users to discover they really need. However, users' preferences can change over time because of the age and the impact of social networks. Recommendation systems must capture users' preferences and recommend suitable items, which is a difficult challenge. This study proposes a novel recommendation system that adapts to the changing preferences of users. By learning and adapting to users' changing preferences better recommendations are provided. This study uses context factors as additional information to model users' preferences more precisely. For the proposed recommendation system, the context is based on users' interaction items within each defined time interval. This study proposes two novel attention mechanisms for the recommendation system. The contextual item attention module captures contextual information, changing pattern in users' preference and the importance of items. The multi-head attention module extends the diversity of users' preferences and adapts to changing preferences. The recommendation performance is improved using additional item's temporal information to model the contextual item's representation. Experiments compare the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art recommendation methods using three real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed context-aware recommendation model outperforms traditional methods and demonstrate the effectiveness with which contextual information is captured by the attention mechanism.

Generative recommendation models represent items as sequences of discrete tokens known as semantic IDs. Existing approaches derive these identifiers using residual or hierarchical vector quantization, assuming that tokens carry independent semantic meaning across quantization levels. Revisiting this assumption, we argue that semantic IDs should behave as hierarchical paths where each token's meaning is conditioned on its prefix. This highlights a mismatch between conventional fixed-codebook quantization and the hierarchical structure implicitly learned by generative recommenders. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Silhouette Tree (AST), a top-down divisive clustering method that constructs semantic IDs as paths within a tree structure. Unlike prior methods with fixed branching factors, AST dynamically determines the number of branches at each node by maximizing the silhouette coefficient, enabling finer partitions in dense regions and compact groupings in homogeneous ones. We further introduce constrained variants that enforce minimum probability mass during splitting to improve supervision for long-tail items. Extensive experiments on five Amazon Review datasets of varying sizes and domains show that AST significantly outperforms strong baselines. These results demonstrate that aligning semantic ID construction with the inherent hierarchical structure of generative recommenders leads to more effective recommendations.

LLM advertising selects advertisements based on user conversations, where user needs may extend beyond explicit product searches. ChatGPT Ads allows advertisers to provide natural-language context hints describing what they offer, who may find it useful, and when it may be useful, as additional information for ranking advertisements across diverse user conversations. However, how to effectively construct these hints remains unclear. We formulate Context Hint Optimization (CHO) as the problem of constructing context hints to improve an advertisement's ranking under a given budget. Drawing on established marketing frameworks, we develop seven context hint generation strategies covering What, Who, and When, along with a Unified strategy that combines all seven dimensions. We introduce CHO-Bench and conduct over 1.19 million paired evaluations across five datasets using embedding-based and LLM-based rankers. Our results show that context hints improve advertisement rankings under the evaluated offline rankers. While individual strategies achieve similar average gains and Unified offers no consistent advantage, strategy differences become more pronounced under specific generation-ranking configurations, with embedding-based and LLM-based rankers favoring different information dimensions. Increasing the hint budget further improves rankings with diminishing marginal gains. These findings establish an offline benchmark for studying ad-side ranking optimization in LLM advertising and highlight opportunities for model-specific hint selection and budget-aware generation and aggregation.

On-demand delivery platforms such as DoorDash and Uber Eats impose a constraint absent in traditional e-commerce: merchants beyond the user's delivery range are invalid candidates rather than merely low-ranked. Generative retrieval has recently shown strong potential in large-scale retrieval systems. Adapting it to this setting, however, poses three challenges. First, existing semantic IDs encode geography only as a soft signal, so reachability can only rely on a non-differentiable post-generation hard truncation. Second, user preferences vary substantially across both regions and queries, so aggregating historical behaviors without conditioning on geography and the current query yields biased interest estimates. Third, the retrieved candidate set is evaluated by its collective value, yet autoregressive training scores each sequence independently, with no set-level signal to discourage redundant near-duplicates. To address the challenges, we propose TS-GEAR, a unified generative retrieval framework for on-demand delivery: (1) Geo-Semantic ID splits merchant identifiers into geographic prefixes and semantic suffixes, making reachability a prediction target rather than a post-hoc filter; (2) Query-Geo Target Attention aggregates historical behaviors using the real-time query and location as dual targets, while encoding each behavior's own location into its attention key; (3) GMPO (Group Marginal Policy Optimization) rewrites advantages using a deduplicated group reward and marginal advantage within GRPO, avoiding auxiliary diversity objectives. Deployed online with a lightweight 0.1B backbone, TS-GEAR serves over 150 million queries per day in the search advertising pipeline of Taobao Shangou, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art generative retrieval methods on both HitRate and geographic validity, and achieving 3.8% gains in ad impressions and 4.2% in ad revenue.

We study Vietnamese statutory Article retrieval on DRiLL using features for provision identity and local form, same-law support, and citation and lineage evidence. Across five random seeds, selectors sharing candidates, listwise Qwen evidence, and learner settings improve official $F_2$ from 71.77% to 72.91%, with the largest descriptive gain on two-Article questions. Added features account for 18.20% of the proposed selector's total decision-tree split gain, measured as training-objective reduction, mainly from same-law and citation evidence. Cases reveal base provisions and amendments, companion recovery, distractor removal, and failures. These findings motivate research on other datasets, representations, and learners without establishing individual feature effects or requiring LightGBM, hand-crafted scores, or explicit graphs.