Papers for

enterprise chatbot developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Reusable evidence views reduce memory and latency in language model retrieval

REVA: Reusable Evidence View Aggregation for Context-Efficient RAG Serving

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves knowledge-intensive large language model (LLM) applications by conditioning generation on retrieved documents, but longer contexts increase latency, key-value (KV) cache memory, and token cost. Post-retrieval compression can reduce this cost, yet existing compressors often operate independently for each query, rely on auxiliary models or rewriting, and introduce online overhead that can offset the benefit of shorter prompts. We revisit RAG compression from a data-mining perspective by aggregating historical query--document--model interactions into reusable evidence views. We first show that modern compressors have unstable gains over simple truncation and can add substantial inference-time latency. We then propose Reusable Evidence View Aggregation (REVA), a framework that mines the target generator's historical attention traces into a document-keyed, budget-agnostic score store. REVA maps token-level attention to readable word units, aggregates importance across repeated document accesses, and renders budget-specific plain-text views that preserve document order and the standard RAG interface. Across four representative benchmarks and modern LLMs, REVA improves generation quality by 1.0--5.8 points over existing advances, while reducing compression overhead by a factor of 5.3 to 15.6, adding less than 40 ms of latency.

Thu 10 SeptMachine LearningComputation and LanguageInformation Retrieval
The gist
When large language models look up documents to answer tough questions, handling many documents slows things down and costs more memory. The authors show that existing ways to shrink these documents can be slow or unreliable. They introduce REVA, a method that learns which parts of documents are important by reusing past attention data, creating compact views that keep useful content. This makes answers better and faster with much less extra processing time.
Open 2609.11209v1

Latent detection improves instruction conflict handling in large language models

Combating Instruction Conflict via Energy-Driven Latent Conflict Detection

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instructions, yet they remain vulnerable to conflicts in which user directives override system-level constraints. Existing defense mechanisms predominantly focus on static input inspection and therefore fail to detect Response Drift, a phenomenon in which the model's final response violates system-level constraints despite seemingly compliant inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ELCD, a response-level latent conflict detector for post-generation, pre-delivery verification. Given the full generated output, ELCD constructs a composite hidden-state representation by concatenating the final-token embedding with the mean-pooled response embedding. It then optimizes a pairwise margin ranking objective to separate compliant and drifting responses in latent space. Extensive experiments across five mainstream LLMs ranging from 1.5B to 14B parameters demonstrate that ELCD significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Notably, it improves the PR-AUC on Llama-2-7B by approximately 30 percentage points and reduces the False Positive Rate at 95% TPR (FPR95) on Mistral-7B to 2.67%. These results suggest that ELCD provides a promising approach for latent instruction-conflict detection in open-weight or self-hosted LLM deployments.

Tue 8 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models sometimes give answers that go against important system rules when following user instructions. The authors found that current checks focus only on the input and miss when the final answer breaks these rules, a problem they call Response Drift. They created ELCD, a method that looks at the model's full answer to spot hidden conflicts before sending it out. ELCD uses patterns in the hidden data of the model's output to better tell when answers are going off track. Tests on several popular models showed ELCD works much better than existing methods at catching these conflicts.
Open 2609.08646v1