collaborators

11 papers

cs.IR2026

Reconstructing Content with Collaborative Attention for Universal Multimodal Representation Learning

Jiahan Chen, Da Li, Hengran Zhang +6

Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classi…

cs.IR2026

An Iterative Utility Judgment Framework Inspired by Philosophical Relevance via LLMs

Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo +1

Relevance and utility are two frequently used measures to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval (IR) system. Relevance emphasizes the aboutness of a result to a qu…

cs.IR2026

Beyond Relevance: Utility-Centric Retrieval in the LLM Era

Hengran Zhang, Minghao Tang, Keping Bi +1

Information retrieval systems have traditionally optimized for topical relevance-the degree to which retrieved documents match a query. However, relevance only approximates a deepe…

cs.IR2026

Training Dense Retrievers with Multiple Positive Passages

Benben Wang, Minghao Tang, Hengran Zhang +2

Modern knowledge-intensive systems, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), rely on effective retrievers to establish the performance ceiling for downstream modules. However,…

cs.IR2026

Bagging-Based Model Merging for Robust General Text Embeddings

Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo +4

General-purpose text embedding models underpin a wide range of NLP and information retrieval applications, and are typically trained on large-scale multi-task corpora to encourage…

cs.CL2026

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo +4

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is typically optimized for topical relevance, yet its success ultimately depends on whether retrieved passages are useful for a large language…