Yu Liang, Liangxin Liu, Longzheng Wang, Wangyan, Zhang Yueyang, Long Xia, Zhiyuan Sun, Daiting Shi. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Kai Qin, Liangxin Liu, Yu Liang, Longzheng Wang, Wangyan, Zhang Yueyang, Long Xia, Zhiyuan Sun, Houde Liu, Daiting Shi. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Multimodal embedding models, rooted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have yielded significant performance improvements across diverse tasks such as retrieval and classification. However, most existing approaches rely heavily on large-scale contrastive learning and offer limited exploration of how the architectural and training paradigms of MLLMs affect embedding quality. While effective for generation, the causal attention and next-token prediction paradigm of MLLMs does not explicitly encourage the formation of globally compact representations, limiting their effectiveness as multimodal embedding backbones. To address this, we propose CoCoA, a Content reconstruction pre-training paradigm based on Collaborative Attention for universal multimodal representation learning. Specifically, we restructure the attention flow and introduce an EOS-based reconstruction task, encouraging the model to reconstruct input from the corresponding (EOS) embeddings. This drives the multimodal model to compress the semantic information of the input into the (EOS) token, laying the foundations for subsequent contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on MMEB-V1 demonstrate that CoCoA built upon Qwen2-VL and Qwen2.5-VL significantly improves embedding quality. Results validate that content reconstruction serves as an effective strategy to maximize the value of existing data, enabling multimodal embedding models to generate compact and informative representations, raising their performance ceiling. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoCoA.

In commercial web search, aligning content freshness with user intent remains challenging due to the highly varied lifespans of information. Traditional industrial approaches rely on static time-window filtering, resulting in ''one-size-fits-all'' rankings where content may be chronologically recent but semantically expired. To address this limitation, we present a novel Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Query Aware Dynamic Content Expiration Prediction Framework deployed in Baidu search, reformulating timeliness as a dynamic validity inference task. Our framework extracts fine-grained temporal contexts from documents and leverages LLMs to deduce a query-specific ''validity horizon'', a semantic boundary defining when information becomes obsolete based on user intent. Integrated with robust hallucination mitigation strategies to ensure reliability, our approach has been evaluated through offline and online A/B testing on live production traffic. Results demonstrate significant improvements in search freshness and user experience metrics, validating the effectiveness of LLM-driven reasoning for solving semantic expiration at an industrial scale.

Query rewriting is a core component of web search, yet traditional methods mainly rely on large language model (LLM) prompting, fine-tuning, or personalized rewriting based on user history. These approaches often overlook population-level intent signals in large-scale query logs, leading to misalignment with mainstream search intent. Moreover, although large models achieve high rewriting quality, their computational demands and deployment complexity limit industrial applicability. To address this, we propose Population-Guided Intent-Aware Rewriting (PGIR), which captures dominant population intent via a Semantic Clustering Unit (SCU) and generates intent-aware rewrites through a Rewriting Unit (RU), aligning queries with mainstream search goals without requiring user history.Building upon PGIR, we further introduce PGIR-DPA, a dual-phase adaptation strategy that transfers capabilities from a teacher LLM to lightweight student models, achieving high-quality rewriting while ensuring industrial scalability. Extensive offline and online experiments, including A/B testing on Baidu Search, show substantial improvements in rewrite quality and a 6.28% relative increase in user satisfaction. The framework has been fully deployed in Baidu's production search system, operating stably at scale, validating its industrial feasibility and commercial value.

This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for annotating document utility in training retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, aiming to reduce dependence on costly human annotations.We address the gap between retrieval relevance and generative utility by employing LLMs to annotate document utility.To effectively utilize multiple positive samples per query, we introduce a novel loss that maximizes their summed marginal likelihood.Using the Qwen-2.5-32Bmodel, we annotate utility on the MS MARCO dataset and conduct retrieval experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR, as well as RAG experiments on MS MARCO QA, NQ, and HotpotQA.Our results show that LLM-generated annotations enhance out-of-domain retrieval performance and improve RAG outcomes compared to models trained solely on human annotations or downstream QA metrics.Furthermore, combining LLM annotations with just 20% of human labels achieves performance comparable to using full human annotations.Our study offers a comprehensive approach to utilizing LLM annotations for initializing QA systems on new corpora.Our

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in zero-shot documents ranking, yielding commendable results. However, several significant challenges still persist in LLMs for ranking: (1) LLMs are constrained by limited input length, precluding them from processing a large number of documents simultaneously; (2) The output document sequence is influenced by the input order of documents, resulting in inconsistent ranking outcomes; (3) Achieving a balance between cost and ranking performance is challenging. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel documents ranking method called TourRank1. which is inspired by the sport tournaments, such as FIFA World Cup. Specifically, we 1) overcome the limitation in input length and reduce the ranking latency by incorporating a multi-stage grouping strategy similar to the parallel group stage of sport tournaments; 2) improve the ranking performance and robustness to input orders by using a points system to ensemble multiple ranking results. We test TourRank with different LLMs on the TREC DL datasets and the BEIR benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that TourRank delivers state-of-the-art performance at a modest cost.

Search result diversification (SRD), which aims to ensure that documents in a ranking list cover a broad range of subtopics, is a significant and widely studied problem in Information Retrieval and Web Search. Existing methods primarily utilize a paradigm of ''greedy selection'', i.e., selecting one document with the highest diversity score at a time or optimize an approximation of the objective function. These approaches tend to be inefficient and are easily trapped in a suboptimal state. To address these challenges, we introduce Multi-Agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for search result DIVersity, which called MA4DIV. In this approach, each document is an agent and the search result diversification is modeled as a cooperative task among multiple agents. By modeling the SRD ranking problem as a cooperative MARL problem, this approach allows for directly optimizing the diversity metrics, such as α-NDCG, while achieving high training efficiency. We conducted experiments on public TREC datasets and a larger scale dataset in the industrial setting. The experiemnts show that MA4DIV achieves substantial improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency than existing baselines, especially on the industrial dataset.

Existing studies have proven that pre-trained ranking models outperform pre-trained language models when it comes to ranking tasks. To pre-train such models, researchers have utilized large-scale search logs and clicks as weak-supervised signals of query-document relevance. However, search logs are incomplete and sparse. Different users with the same intent tend to use various forms of queries. It is hard for recorded clicks to sufficiently cover diverse relevance patterns between queries and documents. Moreover, the diverse intentions of a large user base lead to long-tail distributions of search intents. Deriving sufficient relevance signals from sparse clicks of these long-tail intents poses another challenge. Therefore, there is significant potential for exploring richer relevance signals beyond direct clicks to pre-train high-quality ranking models. To tackle this problem, we develop two exploratory data augmentation strategies that consider the diversity of query forms from local and global perspectives, hence mining potential and diverse relevance signals from search logs. A generative augmentation strategy is also devised to create supplementary positive samples, to enhance the ranking ability for long-tail query intents. We leverage a multi-level pairwise ranking objective and a contrastive learning approach to enable our model to capture fine-grained relevance patterns and be robust for noisy training samples. Experimental results on a large-scale public dataset and a commercial dataset confirm that our model, namely PRADA, can yield better ranking effectiveness over existing pre-trained ranking models.

Product quantization (PQ) has been usually applied to dense retrieval (DR) of documents thanks to its competitive time, memory efficiency and compatibility with other approximate nearest search (ANN) methods. Originally, PQ was learned to minimize the reconstruction loss, i.e., the distortions between the original dense embeddings and the reconstructed embeddings after quantization. Unfortunately, such an objective is inconsistent with the goal of selecting ground-truth documents for the input query, which may cause a severe loss of retrieval quality. Recent research has primarily concentrated on jointly training the biencoders and PQ to ensure consistency for improved performance. However, it is still difficult to design an approach that can cope with challenges like discrete representation collapse, mining informative negatives, and deploying effective embedding-based retrieval (EBR) systems in a real search engine.

Pre-trained language representation models (PLMs) such as BERT and Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration (ERNIE) have been integral to achieving recent improvements on various downstream tasks, including information retrieval. However, it is nontrivial to directly utilize these models for the large-scale web search due to the following challenging issues: (1) the prohibitively expensive computations of massive neural PLMs, especially for long texts in the web document, prohibit their deployments in the web search system that demands extremely low latency; (2) the discrepancy between existing task-agnostic pre-training objectives and the ad hoc retrieval scenarios that demand comprehensive relevance modeling is another main barrier for improving the online retrieval and ranking effectiveness; and (3) to create a significant impact on real-world applications, it also calls for practical solutions to seamlessly interweave the resultant PLM and other components into a cooperative system to serve web-scale data. Accordingly, we contribute a series of successfully applied techniques in tackling these exposed issues in this work when deploying the state-of-the-art Chinese pre-trained language model, i.e., ERNIE, in the online search engine system. We first present novel practices to perform expressive PLM-based semantic retrieval with a flexible poly-interaction scheme and cost-efficiently contextualize and rank web documents with a cheap yet powerful Pyramid-ERNIE architecture. We then endow innovative pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms to explicitly incentivize the query-document relevance modeling in PLM-based retrieval and ranking with the large-scale noisy and biased post-click behavioral data. We also introduce a series of effective strategies to seamlessly interwoven the designed PLM-based models with other conventional components into a cooperative system. Extensive offline and online experimental results show that our proposed techniques are crucial to achieving more effective search performance. We also provide a thorough analysis of our methodology and experimental results.

Machine reading comprehension of news articles remains to be a challenging task since the lengths of its context documents are long. Such reading comprehension task usually requires document-level language understanding while state-of-the-art, pretrained question answering models can only encode sequences with a predefined length limit. In this paper, we propose a novel Question-Oriented Propagation Network (QOPN) model for such task. Specifically, our proposed QOPN first uses a context encoding module to find local question-related clues. Then, it employs a multi-step reasoning module to aggregate question-focused information for iterative reasoning. The novel design put emphasis on capturing question-related information and allow long-range information integration, which is especially beneficial for long-context reading comprehension task. Experiments on two challenging machine comprehension datasets show that the proposed QOPN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

Retrieval is a crucial stage in web search that identifies a small set of query-relevant candidates from a billion-scale corpus. Discovering more semantically-related candidates in the retrieval stage is very promising to expose more high-quality results to the end users. However, it still remains non-trivial challenges of building and deploying effective retrieval models for semantic matching in real search engine. In this paper, we describe the retrieval system that we developed and deployed in Baidu Search. The system exploits the recent state-of-the-art Chinese pretrained language model, namely Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration (ERNIE), which facilitates the system with expressive semantic matching. In particular, we developed an ERNIE-based retrieval model, which is equipped with 1) expressive Transformer-based semantic encoders, and 2) a comprehensive multi-stage training paradigm. More importantly, we present a practical system workflow for deploying the model in web-scale retrieval. Eventually, the system is fully deployed into production, where rigorous offline and online experiments were conducted. The results show that the system can perform high-quality candidate retrieval, especially for those tail queries with uncommon demands. Overall, the new retrieval system facilitated by pretrained language model (i.e., ERNIE) can largely improve the usability and applicability of our search engine.

As the heart of a search engine, the ranking system plays a crucial role in satisfying users' information demands. More recently, neural rankers fine-tuned from pre-trained language models (PLMs) establish state-of-the-art ranking effectiveness. However, it is nontrivial to directly apply these PLM-based rankers to the large-scale web search system due to the following challenging issues: (1) the prohibitively expensive computations of massive neural PLMs, especially for long texts in the web document, prohibit their deployments in an online ranking system that demands extremely low latency; (2) the discrepancy between existing ranking-agnostic pre-training objectives and the ad-hoc retrieval scenarios that demand comprehensive relevance modeling is another main barrier for improving the online ranking system; (3) a real-world search engine typically involves a committee of ranking components, and thus the compatibility of the individually fine-tuned ranking model is critical for a cooperative ranking system. In this work, we contribute a series of successfully applied techniques in tackling these exposed issues when deploying the state-of-the-art Chinese pre-trained language model, i.e., ERNIE, in the online search engine system. We first articulate a novel practice to cost-efficiently summarize the web document and contextualize the resultant summary content with the query using a cheap yet powerful Pyramid-ERNIE architecture. Then we endow an innovative paradigm to finely exploit the large-scale noisy and biased post-click behavioral data for relevance-oriented pre-training. We also propose a human-anchored fine-tuning strategy tailored for the online ranking system, aiming to stabilize the ranking signals across various online components. Extensive offline and online experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly boost the search engine's performance.