Retrieval

TL;DR Neuro‑symbolic architecture (LLMs + Prolog) turns tax calculation from vibes to verifiable logic. The paper we analyze shows that adding a symbolic solver, selective refusal, and exemplar‑guided parsing can lower the break‑even cost of an AI tax assistant to a fraction of average U.S. filing costs. Even more interesting: chat‑tuned models often beat reasoning‑tuned models at few‑shot translation into logic — a counterintuitive result with big product implications. Why this matters for operators (not just researchers) Most back‑office finance work is a chain of (1) rules lookup, (2) calculations, and (3) audit trails. Generic LLMs are great at (1), decent at (2), and historically bad at (3). This work shows a practical path to auditable automation: translate rules and facts into Prolog, compute with a trusted engine, and price the risk of being wrong directly into your product economics. ...

TL;DR DeepScholar-Bench introduces a live (continuously refreshable) benchmark and a holistic automated evaluation for generative research synthesis. Its reference pipeline, DeepScholar‑base, is simple yet competitive. The headline: today’s best systems organize text well but miss key facts, under-retrieve important sources, and fail verifiability at scale. That’s not a death knell—it’s a roadmap. Why this matters for business readers Enterprise “research copilots” promise to digest the live web, summarize options, and provide auditable citations. In practice, three gaps keep showing up: ...

TL;DR A new multi‑agent pipeline builds an ontology‑light knowledge graph from regulatory text, embeds subject–predicate–object triplets alongside their source snippets in one vector store, and uses triplet‑level retrieval to ground LLM answers. The result: better section retrieval at stricter similarity thresholds, slightly higher answer accuracy, and far stronger navigability across related rules. For compliance teams, the payoff is auditability and explainability baked into the data layer, not just the prompt. ...

In the world of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), most systems still treat document retrieval like a popularity contest — fetch the most relevant-looking text and hope the generator can stitch the answer together. But as any manager who has tried to merge three half-baked reports knows, relevance without completeness is a recipe for failure. A new framework, Compositional Answer Retrieval (CAR), aims to fix that. Instead of asking a retrieval model to find a single “best” set of documents, CAR teaches it to think like a strategist: break the question into its components, retrieve for each, and then assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. ...

Most “smart” RAG stacks are actually compulsive googlers: they fetch first and think later. UR² (“Unified RAG and Reasoning”) flips that reflex. It trains a model to reason by default and retrieve only when necessary, using reinforcement learning (RL) to orchestrate the dance between internal knowledge and external evidence. Why this matters for builders: indiscriminate retrieval is the silent cost center of LLM systems—extra latency, bigger bills, brittle answers. UR² shows a way to make retrieval selective, structured, and rewarded, yielding better accuracy on exams (MMLU‑Pro, MedQA), real‑world QA (HotpotQA, Bamboogle, MuSiQue), and even math. ...

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is often hailed as a cure-all for domain adaptation and factual accuracy in large language models (LLMs). By injecting external context at inference time, RAG systems promise to boost performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. But a new paper, RAG in the Wild (Xu et al., 2025), reveals that this promise is brittle when we leave the sanitized lab environment and enter the real world of messy, multi-source knowledge. ...

In the AI race to make large language models both factual and reasoned, two camps have emerged: one focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to fight hallucination, the other on long-chain reasoning to mimic logic. But neither wins alone. This week’s survey by Li et al. (2025), Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning, delivers the most comprehensive synthesis yet of the field’s convergence point: synergized RAG–Reasoning. It’s no longer a question of whether retrieval helps generation or reasoning helps retrieval—but how tightly the two can co-evolve, often under the coordination of autonomous agents. ...