The Inference Report

Reasoning-conditioned embeddings can improve retrieval by progressively refining semantic constraints. However, additional reasoning may introduce over-generalized or semantically noisy abstractions that weaken retrieval specificity. Existing methods largely supervise reasoning through final retrieval outcomes, providing limited guidance over the refinement process itself. We propose AURA, a framework that directly supervises intermediate reasoning states according to how well they separate relevant documents from hard distractors. AURA further trains a lightweight utility estimator over prefix-conditioned embeddings to adapt reasoning depth at inference time. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, AURA-4B achieves 34.7 average nDCG@10 while using 2.8 reasoning steps and 96 generated tokens per query. Under matched deployment conditions, adaptive stopping reduces latency from 4.6 to 0.76 seconds relative to full-trajectory reasoning. Results on MS MARCO further suggest that this specialization need not substantially degrade conventional in-domain retrieval.

Recommender systems often need to balance multiple conflicting objectives. Controllable Multi-Objective Recommendation (CMOR) enables dynamic adjustment of objective trade-offs at inference time without retraining, adapting to shifting user or system requirements. Existing CMOR approaches typically rely on output-level reranking or parameter-generating modules, which either limit the scope of feasible trade-offs or incur substantial training and inference cost. Model merging provides a promising alternative by reusing multiple objective-specific models via parameter combination. However, its direct application to recommender systems is challenging due to the lack of a shared linear regime and cross-objective interference. To address these issues, we propose RecSoup, a lightweight two-stage approach for effective CMOR via specialized model merging. RecSoup first mitigates parameter interference across objectives through a pruning strategy that jointly considers objective-specific importance and cross-objective relevance. It then performs adaptive parameter merging via a learnable preference-to-coefficient mapping, allowing dynamic trade-off control at inference time without joint retraining or additional generative modules. Theoretically, we prove that RecSoup outperforms the parameter generation paradigm in effectiveness and efficiency, as it can fully navigate the Pareto front without smoothness constraints. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that RecSoup achieves improved Pareto front quality and effective controllability while delivers 165--228x faster inference-time latency than parameter generation approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/35798642/RECSOUP.git.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for election information, yet little is known about how external web content shapes the political information they present. Generative engine optimization (GEO) rewrites web content to improve its visibility in generated responses. To investigate its potential risks in voting scenarios (VoteGEO), we introduce VoteGEO-Bench, a benchmark covering the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the 2026 Japanese House of Representatives election, combining election-related queries, historical webpages, and voter personas. We first analyze sources cited by generative engines and find that many citations come from lower-cost owned and open-platform sources, while some webpages remain visible across days. We then evaluate 11 rewriting strategies in 4 categories, examining target specification, effectiveness across engines and elections, and the role of voter personas. Rewriting without specifying a target rarely increases target exposure, whereas target-specified rewriting more often does. Strategies that improve page organization or strengthen a position through argumentation yield greater gains than adding supporting evidence or changing wording. For the two strongest strategies, gains remain broadly positive across evaluated U.S. personas, but persona conditioning shows no consistent effect on these gains. Explicit partisan identities can create baseline exposure gaps larger than the gain from rewriting one webpage. When partisanship is implicit in the voter profile, baseline shifts depend on how strongly the engine responds to that signal.

Graph Collaborative Filtering models have achieved remarkable success in recommendation systems. However, they inherently suffer from a catastrophic representation collapse in strict cold-start scenarios due to the topological isolation of unobserved items. While integrating multi-modal semantic features offers a potential remedy, directly mapping isolated semantic attributes into a globally topology-driven collaborative space frequently precipitates representation degradation and optimization conflicts. To bridge this fundamental structural divide, we propose DualGCN, an innovative Dual-Branch Graph Knowledge Distillation Framework. Operating under a decoupled two-stage training paradigm, DualGCN first constructs a robust collaborative teacher network where item representations are anchored by a topology-smoothed semantic prior, effectively reshaping the latent manifold. Subsequently, a semantic student branch employs a residual mapping mechanism and a magnitude-agnostic cosine distillation objective to achieve high-fidelity cross-modal alignment without disrupting established collaborative signals. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic norm reconstruction mechanism to rigorously calibrate the physical scales of novel and warm items during global retrieval. Extensive experiments across three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that DualGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in strict cold-start scenarios while comprehensively preserving recommendation accuracy for highly active items.

Counts of which brands a large language model names are useful only if they hold long enough to act on. We test this with a pre-registered replication. The same 162 requests (54 questions in English, Estonian and Finnish about three software categories, four of twelve candidate brands per question, three repeats) were sent to gemini-3.1-pro-preview in three waves within about ten hours on 22 and 23 September 2026, and again on 13 October 2026, 20.3 days after the third wave, with identical request bodies. The plan and its decision rule were frozen, hashed and registered on OSF before the first call. The outcome is a lexical mention label per answer and brand, 648 per wave. The primary forecast, each brand-and-question cell's mention rate over the nine earlier answers, scored Brier 0.0281 and log loss 0.126, against Brier 0.0259 for the six-answer forecast of the 8-hour wave and a registered ceiling of 0.0559. It beat brand history (0.104), the overall rate (0.234) and a constant 0.5 (0.250) on both scores and in all nine question families (exact sign-flip p = 0.0039), so durability holds under the registered rule. A forecast frozen from the first wave alone scored 0.0599, 0.0587 and 0.0604 at horizons of 1.5 hours, 9.6 hours and 20.7 days. Of the 202 cells unanimous in the 8-hour wave, 194 were unchanged at D1 and none reversed. The latest wave alone was nearly as accurate as the pooled history (Brier 0.0292; pooled lower in 5 of 9 families, p = 0.28). Every answer reported the requested model version, and none issued a search query although search was enabled. A blind human check of 96 labels agreed with the rule on 94; both disagreements were adjudicated as rater omissions, so after adjudication the rule matched on 96 of 96. The test covers one model, one interval and twelve known brands, and estimates no decay rate.

Modern conversational information access systems continuously extract user information from conversations to build user profiles for personalized retrieval. As user profiles accumulate over time, they inevitably become noisy, making effective user profile denoising a fundamental challenge. Existing personalized conversational query reformulation methods rely on the black-box reasoning capability of LLMs to expand the original query with relevant user profile phrases, producing a verbose query for retrieval. Such rewrite-then-retrieve pipelines reduce user profile denoising to the explicit selection of profile phrases in the sparse token space, separating personalization from downstream relevance modeling. Consequently, they often fail to identify user information that is truly beneficial for retrieval. To enable retrieval-aware user profile denoising, we propose Personalized Conversational Dense Retrieval (PCDR), which learns to jointly project the conversation history and user profile into a latent embedding space dedicated to retrieval. By inheriting the context denoising capability from conversational dense retrievers, PCDR requires only a handful of personalized relevance annotations for training. We evaluate PCDR on the iKAT 2026 tasks, where it serves as the core retrieval component of a conversational AI agent assisting users with complex information needs.