Artificial Intelligence · 18.08.2026, 08:40 UTC
Navigation-Informed Embeddings: Dense-Retriever Adaptation from Agent Search Traces
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.AI ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 18.08.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
arXiv:2608.15956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic retrieval workflows produce query, retrieval, and stopping traces as a byproduct of answering questions. We study how these traces can adapt a deployed dense retriever to changing workflow distributions without new relevance labels, synthetic queries, or LLM judgments. We introduce Navigation-Informed Embeddings (NIE), a family of trace-derived objectives. NIE-Stop turns the stopping document into a soft positive; NIE-Path additionally uses preceding path documents as hard comparisons and imposes ordinal constraints with geometric decay. A BGE encoder adapted from retained source trajectories improves support Recall@20 on an independent target benchmark from 72.2 to 78.0 overall. NIE-Stop reaches 76.9 overall and 52.3 on long paths; NIE-Path raises long-path performance to 55.4, compared with 46.7 for the unadapted encoder. A shuffled-order control under the full path objective loses 3.2 points. Without public-benchmark training, the same adapter also improves nDCG@10 by 1.9 points on standard BEIR HotpotQA. NIE therefore provides a lightweight adaptation channel for settings where trajectories are already retained, with zero incremental labeling cost.