activity
20242026
most citedThe Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems

204 citations · 223 across the 11 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

14 papers

cs.LG2026

On the Token Collapse Phenomenon in Textual Graph Soft Prompting

Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco, Rishabh Jain, Franco Maria Nardini +3

Recent methods for injecting graph structure into LLM prompts include graph soft prompting, in which a graph neural network (GNN) learns graph-specific tokens that capture relation…

cs.IR2026

A Picture of Agentic Search

Francesca Pezzuti, Ophir Frieder, Fabrizio Silvestri +2

With automated systems increasingly issuing search queries alongside humans, Information Retrieval (IR) faces a major shift. Yet IR remains human-centred, with systems, evaluation…

cs.IR2026★ 1 cited

Statistical Foundations of DIME: Risk Estimation for Practical Index Selection

Giulio D'Erasmo, Cesare Campagnano, Antonio Mallia +3

High-dimensional dense embeddings have become central to modern Information Retrieval, but many dimensions are noisy or redundant. Recently proposed DIME (Dimension IMportance Esti…

cs.LG2025

Early-Exit Graph Neural Networks

Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Franco Maria Nardini +3

Early-exit mechanisms allow deep neural networks to stop inference once prediction confidence is high, reducing latency and energy on easy inputs while retaining full-depth accurac…

cs.IR2025

AMAQA: A Metadata-based QA Dataset for RAG Systems

Davide Bruni, Marco Avvenuti, Nicola Tonellotto +1

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are widely used in question-answering (QA) tasks, but current benchmarks lack metadata integration, limiting their evaluation in scenar…

cs.IR2025

Exploring the Effectiveness of Multi-stage Fine-tuning for Cross-encoder Re-rankers

Francesca Pezzuti, Sean MacAvaney, Nicola Tonellotto

State-of-the-art cross-encoders can be fine-tuned to be highly effective in passage re-ranking. The typical fine-tuning process of cross-encoders as re-rankers requires large amoun…

cs.IR2024

ECLIPSE: Contrastive Dimension Importance Estimation with Pseudo-Irrelevance Feedback for Dense Retrieval

Giulio D'Erasmo, Giovanni Trappolini, Nicola Tonellotto +1

Recent advances in Information Retrieval have leveraged high-dimensional embedding spaces to improve the retrieval of relevant documents. Moreover, the Manifold Clustering Hypothes…

cs.IR2024

Static Pruning in Dense Retrieval using Matrix Decomposition

Federico Siciliano, Francesca Pezzuti, Nicola Tonellotto +1

In the era of dense retrieval, document indexing and retrieval is largely based on encoding models that transform text documents into embeddings. The efficiency of retrieval is dir…

cs.IR2024★ 1 cited

A Theoretical Analysis of Recommendation Loss Functions under Negative Sampling

Giulia Di Teodoro, Federico Siciliano, Nicola Tonellotto +1

Loss functions like Categorical Cross Entropy (CCE), Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), and Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) are commonly used in training Recommender Systems (RSs) to…

cs.IR2024★ 16 cited

A Reproducible Analysis of Sequential Recommender Systems

Filippo Betello, Antonio Purificato, Federico Siciliano +4

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) have emerged as a highly efficient approach to recommendation systems. By leveraging sequential data, SRSs can identify temporal patterns in u…

cs.CL2024

A Tale of Trust and Accuracy: Base vs. Instruct LLMs in RAG Systems

Florin Cuconasu, Giovanni Trappolini, Nicola Tonellotto +1

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence combining a retrieval phase with a generative phase, with the latter typically…

cs.IR2024

Cross-Document Neural Re-Ranking via Query-Induced Subgraphs

Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco, Christian Giannetti, Nicola Tonellotto +1

Neural re-rankers typically score query-document pairs independently, neglecting cross-document context within the retrieved candidate set. We propose Graph Neural Re-Ranking (GNRR…

cs.IR2024★ 1 cited

Generating Query Recommendations via LLMs

Andrea Bacciu, Enrico Palumbo, Andreas Damianou +2

Query recommendation systems are ubiquitous in modern search engines, assisting users in producing effective queries to meet their information needs. However, these systems require…

cs.IR2024★ 204 cited

The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems

Florin Cuconasu, Giovanni Trappolini, Federico Siciliano +5

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a method to extend beyond the pre-trained knowledge of Large Language Models by augmenting the original prompt with rel…