Papers for

information retrieval 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.

RunningTensor improves memory for fast sequence processing models

RunningTensor: Generalizing Linear Attention to Higher-Order Recurrent States

Abstract: Linear attention and state-space models provide linear-time sequence modeling, but their recurrent memory remains a second-order tensor (a matrix), limiting the order of interactions that can be represented in the state. We introduce the RunningTensor, which generalizes this memory to an order-$o$ tensor, updated by a rank-1 outer product and read by contracting against $o-1$ vector queries. Order $2$ recovers linear attention; we study order $3$ as a proof of concept, retaining both recurrent and parallel forms while remaining linear in sequence length $T$ and improving working memory capacity from $\mathcal{O}(W^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(W^o)$. On synthetic multi-query associative recall, RunningTensor outperforms linear-attention and SSM baselines. After pretraining, it also improves performance on language-understanding and non-synthetic retrieval tasks, suggesting that higher-order recurrent state can provide useful additional memory capacity beyond matrix-valued state.

Fri 11 SeptMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Many tools that handle sequences of information quickly use a kind of memory stored as a matrix, which limits how much detail they can remember. The authors created RunningTensor, which lets this memory be a higher-dimensional shape, allowing more complex information to be stored without slowing down. They tested it with synthetic tasks and found it better than existing fast methods, and it also helped with real language understanding and retrieval tasks. This suggests using bigger memories in such models can improve performance.
Open 2609.12814v1

Hybrid agents struggle to combine web search and databases effectively

Benchmarking Hybrid Deep Research Across Database Querying and Web Search

Abstract: While autonomous agents have made significant strides in "deep research" by iteratively navigating the open web to synthesize information, real-world problem-solving is rarely confined to a single environment. Complex analytical tasks inherently require agents to weave together evidence from both ambiguous unstructured text (e.g., the open web) and highly precise structured data (e.g., relational databases). However, existing benchmarks evaluate these modalities in isolation, failing to capture the critical "handoff" - the ability to preserve constraints when moving evidence between systems. We introduce HybridDeepResearch, to our knowledge the first deep-research benchmark that requires both web search and SQL to form a complete, verifiable answer. The benchmark contains 380 tool-dependent tasks grounded in LiveSQLBench-Base-Lite databases and public web corpora, validated through automated checks and human review, and covering three reasoning patterns: SQL2S, S2SQL, and Parallel. Evaluations across proprietary and open-weight models under various agentic scaffolds reveal that even state-of-the-art models like GLM-5.2, Claude-Sonnet-4.6 and GPT-5 achieve only about 50-54% Pass@8 on the hard subset. Notably, results show that directional reasoning is substantially more difficult than parallel intersection, highlighting that bridging structured and unstructured information spaces without losing constraints remains a major open challenge for agentic systems. Code and datasets are publicly available at GitHub (https://github.com/Snowflake-AI-Research/HybridDeepResearch) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Snowflake/HybridDeepResearch).

Tue 8 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Solving complex problems often means using both the open web and structured databases, but current tests usually look at these separately. The authors created a new challenge called HybridDeepResearch that mixes both web search and database queries. They found that even the best AI models meet this challenge only about half the time, especially when they need to handle one step leading into the next. This shows that getting AI to accurately combine these different kinds of information remains very hard.
Open 2609.09410v1