Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning, A Foundation Model for User Activity Sequences at Pinterest, and More!

Vol.113 for Jul 14 - Jul 20, 2025

Stay Ahead of the Curve with the Latest Advancements and Discoveries in Information Retrieval.

This week’s newsletter highlights the following research:

1. A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models, from Li et al.

2. A Foundation Model for Billion-Scale User Activity Sequence Understanding, from Pinterest

3. Encoder vs Decoder: A Controlled Comparison of Language Model Architectures, from Weller et al.

4. An Empirical Study of Contrastive Learning and Knowledge Distillation in Cross-Encoder Reranking, from Xu et al.

5. A Corrected Importance Sampling Approach for Large-Scale Retrieval, from Yandex

6. Analyzing Retrieval Quality in Agentic RAG through Query Performance Prediction, from the University of Glasgow

7. Bridging Offline-Online Evaluation in Recommender Systems, from Wilm et al.

8. Item-Centric Exploration for Cold-Start Problem Resolution, from Google

9. Semantic Similarity-Guided Diffusion for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation, from Sejong University

10. A Unified Framework for Conversational Dense Retrieval and Response Generation, from Mo et al.