activity
20232026
most citedSearch-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning

12 citations · 24 across the 15 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

15 papers

cs.IR2026

Quantifying and Expanding the Theoretical Capacity of Late-Interaction Retrieval Models

Julian Killingback, Varad Ingale, Hamed Zamani +1

Late-interaction retrieval models that use the MaxSim similarity function have shown strong empirical performance, often outperforming single-vector dense and sparse retrieval mode…

cs.CL2026

RICE-PO: Turning Retrieval Interactions into Credit Signals for Reasoning Agents

Mingchen Li, Hansi Zeng, Zhuo Qian +4

Retrieval is increasingly moving from one-shot matching toward interactive reasoning, where language agents iteratively inspect evidence, reformulate queries, and search again. Tra…

cs.AI2026

CoSearch: Joint Training of Reasoning and Document Ranking via Reinforcement Learning for Agentic Search

Hansi Zeng, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar +2

Agentic search -- the task of training agents that iteratively reason, issue queries, and synthesize retrieved information to answer complex questions -- has achieved remarkable pr…

cs.IR2026

TARSE: Test-Time Adaptation via Retrieval of Skills and Experience for Reasoning Agents

Junda Wang, Zonghai Tao, Hansi Zeng +3

Complex clinical decision making often fails not because a model lacks facts, but because it cannot reliably select and apply the right procedural knowledge and the right prior exa…

cs.IR2026

Scaling Laws for Embedding Dimension in Information Retrieval

Julian Killingback, Mahta Rafiee, Madine Manas +1

Dense retrieval, which encodes queries and documents into a single dense vector, has become the dominant neural retrieval approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with fast…

cs.IR2025

Benchmarking Information Retrieval Models on Complex Retrieval Tasks

Julian Killingback, Hamed Zamani

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contra…

cs.CL2025

Can Pre-training Indicators Reliably Predict Fine-tuning Outcomes of LLMs?

Hansi Zeng, Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang +4

While metrics available during pre-training, such as perplexity, correlate well with model performance at scaling-laws studies, their predictive capacities at a fixed model size re…

cs.IR2025

Distillation and Refinement of Reasoning in Small Language Models for Document Re-ranking

Chris Samarinas, Hamed Zamani

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimizatio…

cs.CL2025★ 12 cited

Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning

Bowen Jin, Hansi Zeng, Zhenrui Yue +5

Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLM…

cs.IR2025

Scaling Sparse and Dense Retrieval in Decoder-Only LLMs

Hansi Zeng, Julian Killingback, Hamed Zamani

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential for improving retrieval model performance; however, previous studies have mainly focused on dense retrieval trained w…

cs.IR2025

Hypencoder: Hypernetworks for Information Retrieval

Julian Killingback, Hansi Zeng, Hamed Zamani

Existing information retrieval systems are largely constrained by their reliance on vector inner products to assess query-document relevance, which naturally limits the expressiven…

cs.IR2024★ 8 cited

ProCIS: A Benchmark for Proactive Retrieval in Conversations

Chris Samarinas, Hamed Zamani

The field of conversational information seeking, which is rapidly gaining interest in both academia and industry, is changing how we interact with search engines through natural la…

cs.CL2024

Simulating Task-Oriented Dialogues with State Transition Graphs and Large Language Models

Chris Samarinas, Pracha Promthaw, Atharva Nijasure +3

This paper explores SynTOD, a new synthetic data generation approach for developing end-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems capable of handling complex tasks such as intent…

cs.IR2024★ 1 cited

Planning Ahead in Generative Retrieval: Guiding Autoregressive Generation through Simultaneous Decoding

Hansi Zeng, Chen Luo, Hamed Zamani

This paper introduces PAG-a novel optimization and decoding approach that guides autoregressive generation of document identifiers in generative retrieval models through simultaneo…

cs.IR2023★ 3 cited

Scalable and Effective Generative Information Retrieval

Hansi Zeng, Chen Luo, Bowen Jin +3

Recent research has shown that transformer networks can be used as differentiable search indexes by representing each document as a sequences of document ID tokens. These generativ…