APR: Adaptive Personalised Reranking For Conversational Search

MiniMaestro: Resource-Conscious Conversational Music Recommendation with a Single Open-Weight 8B Model

The RecSys Challenge 2026 Music-CRS (TalkPlay) task formalizes this as two coupled sub-problems: given dialogue history and user context, retrieve a ranked list of the top-20 tracks from the full, unrestricted catalog, and generate a response that justifies the recommendation while sustaining conversational coherence.

Conversational Query Reformulation Using Fine-Grained Retrieval and Keyword Augmentation

Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) is an important component in Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA), where user queries are often incomplete, ambiguous, and dependent on previous dialogue turns. Recent CQR approaches have shown the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in generating standalone queries. However, rewritten queries do not always lead to optimal retrieval performance. This paper presents a retrieval-aware CQR framework that integrates fine-grained retrieval feedback and keyword augmentation to improve downstream document retrieval. Instead of treating the LLM-rewritten query as the final search query, our framework uses it to retrieve candidate documents, identify relevant paragraph-level evidence, generate a pseudo-answer, and extract semantically relevant keywords. These keywords are then filtered based on their alignment with the reformulated query and dialogue history before being incorporated into the final query. We evaluate the proposed framework on a sampled subset of the QReCC dataset using BM25 and GTR as sparse and dense retrieval backbones. The experimental results show that our proposed approach improves retrieval accuracy compared to the baseline model across all metrics such as Recall@10, MRR and NDCG. Specifically, under the BM25 sparse retrieval framework, our best-performing configuration achieves improvements in Recall@10 (81.29), MRR (56.06) and NDCG (60.92) compared to the baseline. A comparable pattern of substantial gains holds under the GTR dense retrieval framework, achieving a Recall@10 (76.51), MRR (53.26) and NDCG (57.54), indicating the effectiveness of our method across different retrieval paradigms.

Showdown 2024: Relevance Feedback Meets Conversational Search

QUMem: Personalized Memory for Query-Conditioned User-State Inference in LLM Agents

A structured memory framework for query-conditioned user-state inference for long-term personalization that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both PersonaMem and KnowU-Bench, demonstrating the effectiveness of query-conditioned user-state inference for long-term personalization.

Personalizing Large Language Models with User Profile Memory

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in personalized applications, where responses must align with individual user preferences, histories, and profiles. A common approach is to inject user information into the prompt at inference time. However, existing methods typically rely on flat profile representations and similarity-based Top-K retrieval, which often introduce noisy or marginally relevant context under limited prompt budgets. In this paper, we propose PersMem, a user profile memory framework for LLM personalization that addresses three key questions: what user information to store, how to organize it, and how to use it effectively during generation. First, we construct a structured user profile memory by extracting entities and concepts from user profiles. Second, we organize the memory into a hierarchical structure that separates short-term interactions from long-term knowledge, enabling scalable and coarse-to-fine retrieval. Third, we introduce a learning-based memory gating mechanism that adaptively selects long-term memory units under prompt budget constraints and directly optimizes answer quality through evaluated signals. Extensive experiments on multiple personalization tasks demonstrate that our approach consistently improves personalization effectiveness while reducing prompt length, compared with existing prompt-based and retrieval-based baselines.

A New Role for Relevance: Guiding Corpus Interaction in Agentic Search

Relevance is a query-dependent estimate of whether a document or excerpt contains useful evidence. Existing retrieval agents use relevance to select top-$k$ content, but document relevance alone cannot localize, compose, or verify the evidence required by complex questions. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) enables such fine-grained operations through grep-style exploration, but its relevance-agnostic search can expose useful clues late and delay convergence. Recent advances use relevance to narrow the corpus into a working space for interaction. Once interaction begins, however, relevance still does not directly guide which documents grep searches first or distinguish informative excerpts from a broad set of matches to let LLMs see them first. We introduce the Relevance-Aware RipGrep Search Agent (RARG), which turns relevance into an execution prior for corpus interaction. RARG provides coarse-to-fine relevance guidance: it orders documents for sequential'ripgrep'traversal to expose globally relevant clues earlier, initializes promising entry points with query-relevant paragraphs, and reranks grep matches to surface informative excerpts that document-level ranking may otherwise obscure. Across challenging browse question answering and reasoning-intensive retrieval, RARG improves the accuracy--efficiency frontier over retrieval-based and direct-interaction agents. These results demonstrate that relevance-aware interaction enables faster and more reliable search convergence.