3 papers
cs.IR2026
The Magnitude Mirage: Rethinking Confidence for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval
Jamie Holdcroft, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Adam Jatowt
Many production RAG systems implement retrieval abstention by thresholding raw similarity scores, implicitly treating score magnitude as a confidence signal. We demonstrate that th…
cs.IR2026
Difficulty-Gated Fusion of Reasoning Views for Temporal Retrieval
Jamie Holdcroft, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Adam Jatowt
Reasoning-intensive temporal retrieval requires matching a query to documents whose relevance depends on shared temporal reasoning rather than lexical overlap. Expanding a query in…
cs.IR2026
Are LLM-Based Retrievers Worth Their Cost? An Empirical Study of Efficiency, Robustness, and Reasoning Overhead
Abdelrahman Abdallah, Jamie Holdcroft, Mohammed Ali +1
Large language model retrievers improve performance on complex queries, but their practical value depends on efficiency, robustness, and reliable confidence signals in addition to…