Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited attention budgets and are uniquely vulnerable to noise; misleading or irrelevant information is no longer just a nuisance, but a direct cause of hallucinations and reasoning failures. In this perspective paper, we argue that denoising-maximizing usable evidence density and verifiability within a context window-is becoming the primary bottleneck across the full information access pipeline. We conceptualize this paradigm shift through a four-stage framework of IR challenges: from inaccessible to undiscoverable, to misaligned, and finally to unverifiable. Furthermore, we provide a pipeline-organized taxonomy of signal-to-noise optimization techniques, spanning indexing, retrieval, context engineering, verification, and agentic workflow. We also present research works on information denoising in domains that rely heavily on retrieval such as lifelong assistant, coding agent, deep research, and multimodal understanding.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown growing potential in molecular sciences, but they often produce chemically inaccurate descriptions and struggle to recognize or justify potential errors.This raises important concerns about their robustness and reliability in scientific applications.To support more rigorous evaluation of LLMs in chemical reasoning, we present the MOLERR2FIX benchmark, designed to assess LLMs on error detection and correction in molecular descriptions.Unlike existing benchmarks focused on molecule-totext generation or property prediction, MOL-ERR2FIX emphasizes fine-grained chemical understanding.It tasks LLMs with identifying, localizing, explaining, and revising potential structural and semantic errors in molecular descriptions.Specifically, MOLERR2FIX consists of 1,193 fine-grained annotated error instances.Each instance contains quadruple annotations, i.e,.(error type, span location, the explanation, and the correction).These tasks are intended to reflect the types of reasoning and verification required in real-world chemical communication.Evaluations of current stateof-the-art LLMs reveal notable performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust chemical reasoning capabilities.MolErr2Fix provides a focused benchmark for evaluating such capabilities and aims to support progress toward more reliable and chemically informed language models.All annotations and accompanying evaluation code are publicly available to facilitate future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved generation performance by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge, a process known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite the potential of this approach, existing studies evaluate RAG effectiveness by 1) assessing retrieval and generation components jointly, which obscures retrieval's distinct contribution, or 2) examining retrievers using traditional metrics such as NDCG, which creates a gap in understanding retrieval's true utility in the overall generation process. To address the above limitations, in this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation method that measures retrieval quality through the lens of information gain within the RAG framework. Specifically, we propose Semantic Perplexity (SePer), a metric that captures the LLM's internal belief about the correctness of the retrieved information. We quantify the utility of retrieval by the extent to which it reduces semantic perplexity post-retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SePer not only aligns closely with human preferences but also offers a more precise and efficient evaluation of retrieval utility across diverse RAG scenarios.

Scientific researchers need intensive information about datasets to effectively evaluate and develop theories and methodologies. The information needs regarding datasets are implicitly embedded in particular research tasks, rather than explicitly expressed in search queries. However, existing scientific retrieval and question-answering (QA) datasets typically address straightforward questions, which do not align with the distribution of real-world research inquiries. To bridge this gap, we developed ScIRGen, a dataset generation framework for scientific QA & retrieval that more accurately reflects the information needs of professional science researchers, and uses it to create a large-scale scientific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) dataset with realistic queries, datasets and papers. Technically, we designed a dataset-oriented information extraction method that leverages academic papers to augment the dataset representation. We then proposed a question generation framework by employing cognitive taxonomy to ensure the quality of synthesized questions. We also design a method to automatically filter synthetic answers based on the perplexity shift of LLMs, which is highly aligned with human judgment of answers' validity. Collectively, these methodologies culminated in the creation of the 61k QA dataset, ScIRGen-Geo. We benchmarked representative methods on the ScIRGen-Geo dataset for their question-answering and retrieval capabilities, finding out that current methods still suffer from reasoning from complex questions. This work advances the development of more sophisticated tools to support the intricate information needs of the scientific community.

Foundation models (FMs), such as GPT-4 and AlphaFold, are reshaping the landscape of scientific research. Beyond accelerating tasks such as hypothesis generation, experimental design, and result interpretation, they prompt a more fundamental question: Are FMs merely enhancing existing scientific methodologies, or are they redefining the way science is conducted? In this paper, we argue that FMs are catalyzing a transition toward a new scientific paradigm. We introduce a three-stage framework to describe this evolution: (1) Meta-Scientific Integration, where FMs enhance workflows within traditional paradigms; (2) Hybrid Human-AI Co-Creation, where FMs become active collaborators in problem formulation, reasoning, and discovery; and (3) Autonomous Scientific Discovery, where FMs operate as independent agents capable of generating new scientific knowledge with minimal human intervention. Through this lens, we review current applications and emerging capabilities of FMs across existing scientific paradigms. We further identify risks and future directions for FM-enabled scientific discovery. This position paper aims to support the scientific community in understanding the transformative role of FMs and to foster reflection on the future of scientific discovery.

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation.The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query and passage pairs.However, the definition of relevance is often ambiguous.We observed that a major class of relevance aligns with the concept of entailment in NLI tasks.Based on this observation, we designed a method called entailment tuning to improve the embedding of dense retrievers.Specifically, we unify the form of retrieval data and NLI data using existence claim as a bridge.Then, we train retrievers to predict the claims entailed in a passage with a variant task of masked prediction.Our method can be efficiently plugged into current dense retrieval methods, and experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

In this paper, we define and study a new Cloth2Body problem which has a goal of generating 3d human body meshes from a 2D clothing image. Unlike the existing human mesh recovery problem, Cloth2Body needs to address new and emerging challenges raised by the partial observation of the input and the high diversity of the output. Indeed, there are three specific challenges. First, how to locate and pose human bodies into the clothes. Second, how to effectively estimate body shapes out of various clothing types. Finally, how to generate diverse and plausible results from a 2D clothing image. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework that can accurately estimate 3D body mesh parameterized by pose and shape from a 2D clothing image. Along this line, we first utilize Kinematics-aware Pose Estimation to estimate body pose parameters. 3D skeleton is employed as a proxy followed by an inverse kinematics module to boost the estimation accuracy. We additionally design an adaptive depth trick to align the re-projected 3D mesh better with 2D clothing image by disentangling the effects of object size and camera extrinsic. Next, we propose Physics-informed Shape Estimation to estimate body shape parameters. 3D shape parameters are predicted based on partial body measurements estimated from RGB image, which not only improves pixel-wise human-cloth alignment, but also enables flexible user editing. Finally, we design Evolution-based pose generation method, a skeleton transplanting method inspired by genetic algorithms to generate diverse reasonable poses during inference. As shown by experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and can effectively recover natural and diverse 3D body meshes from 2D images that align well with clothing.