VisDocAgentBench: Benchmarking Agents for Visually Rich Document Retrieval

Visually rich documents encode relevance through language, layout, structured visual elements, and corpus context, yet retrieval is typically evaluated by one-shot query--page matching. Agentic-search benchmarks usually score downstream question answering or report generation, leaving document ranking under iterative evidence acquisition underexplored. We introduce VisDocAgentBench, a closed-corpus benchmark comparing static and agentic retrieval under a shared ranked-output contract. It contains 2,375 pages from 100 documents and 120 unique-target queries balanced across direct, one-bridge, and two-bridge evidence structures. Relation-preserving construction yields semantic, relational, and visual queries, followed by full-document review and hard-negative validation. A strong late-interaction visual retriever reaches 97.50% Recall@1 on direct items but 2.50% on two-bridge items, exposing the limits of query--target matching when relevance depends on corpus context. Agents recover much of this loss, but planner choice and retrieval representation remain decisive. Every planner performs better with visual retrieval, whose best R@1 reaches 67.50% versus 37.50% for OCR-text. Ablations identify iterative search and page inspection as consequential capabilities, and providing the complete support context improves ranking on both routes. Trace analysis localizes the remaining losses to target discovery, candidate examination, and evidence-role integration. These findings motivate retrieval agents that combine modality-preserving discovery with evidence-directed verification.

Requirement--Evidence Alignment for Compositional E-Commerce Queries

Compositional e-commerce queries express multiple requirements that must hold jointly, yet existing rerankers collapse these constraints into aggregate relevance and often promote topical near misses over feasible products. In this paper, we introduce REAlign, a novel requirement-evidence-aligned reranking framework that explicitly connects typed query requirements with visible evidence. REAlign distinguishes satisfied, violated, and unsupported conditions, constructs requirement-targeted contrasts that expose failure modes, and optimizes duplicate-free partial rankings through Requirement-Aware Group-Relative Policy Optimization. Its list utility preserves relevance while incorporating requirement satisfaction, evidence support, material violations, and output validity. Experiments on two fixed-pool e-commerce benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong supervised and policy-optimization baselines under matched training budgets, with fewer violations among top-ranked candidates and larger gains at shallow ranks. Controlled ablations confirm the complementary value of requirement modeling, evidence grounding, and decomposed optimization.

Unpaired Modality-Agnostic Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) formulates recommendation as autoregressive generation over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). Although recent multimodal GR methods improve semantic ID construction with visual and textual information, they typically require item-level paired observations, restricting tokenization to the intersection of modality availability. Moreover, incorporating unpaired observations is nontrivial because small representation shifts may cross quantization boundaries and produce incompatible identifier sequences. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{Unpair}ed Modality-Agnostic \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{R}ecommendation (UnpairGR), which learns a unified semantic-ID space from paired, image-only, and text-only observations. UnpairGR confines modality-specific processing to lightweight input projections while sharing the subsequent Transformer and residual codebooks across all observation conditions. Paired observations establish a reliability-guided cross-modal consensus, whereas unimodal observations directly refine the same representations and codes. The learned tokenizer is then fixed to provide stationary targets for a single autoregressive recommender, without feature imputation, modality-specific codebooks, or fallback mappings. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that UnpairGR consistently improves recommendation performance under both fully observed and incomplete-observation settings.

CORE-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Retrieval in the Era of Agentic Coding

Code retrieval is becoming central to coding agents, but agentic coding requires more than matching a natural-language query to an isolated snippet. Given a user request, a coding agent needs to navigate a concrete repository state, locate relevant files and functions, gather supporting context, and filter similar in-repository distractors. Existing code retrieval benchmarks mainly evaluate docstring-to-function or snippet-level matching, thereby missing this requirement-driven repository search problem. To address this gap, we introduce CORE-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for code retrieval in the era of agentic coding. CORE-Bench evaluates code retrieval ability at three levels: code understanding, issue-to-edit localization, and broader context retrieval. Built from curated code-search tasks and SWE-bench-series instances, CORE-Bench contains over 180K queries and 106K broader-context relevance labels. Experiments with representative embedding models show a sharp drop from traditional code search to code retrieval in agentic coding settings. Simple supervised fine-tuning of existing embedding models significantly improves performance in this setting, suggesting substantial room for further progress.

Beyond Matching: Category-Guided Latent Intent Reasoning for Generative Retrieval in E-Commerce

Generative retrieval offers a new paradigm for e-commerce search by mapping user queries directly to product Semantic Identifiers (SIDs). However, e-commerce queries are often short, noisy, attribute-heavy, and associated with multiple category-consistent products, creating a substantial representation gap between natural-language shopping intent and artificially constructed item SIDs. Explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning can help bridge this gap, but its extra generation cost is difficult to reconcile with the low-latency requirements of online e-commerce systems. To address this challenge, we propose CaLIR (Category-guided Latent Intent Reasoning), a category-guided latent intent reasoning framework for e-commerce generative retrieval. Rather than generating explicit textual rationales, CaLIR learns continuous latent intent states before SID decoding and uses product category hierarchies as a natural scaffold for coarse-to-fine intent reasoning. Specifically, we introduce hierarchical semantic reasoning to align latent states with category-level shopping intent, and query-wise reasoning enhancement to model diverse intent paths under multi-positive queries. CaLIR further combines a query-specific dynamic prefix trie, assembled from pre-indexed category-level tries, with reasoning-aware constrained decoding. Experiments on multilingual e-commerce search datasets show that CaLIR achieves a better balance between retrieval effectiveness and inference efficiency than existing methods, while also demonstrating transferability and robustness across induced hierarchies and different generative backbones.

LASAR: Latent Adaptive Semantic Aligned Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in various tasks, yet the inefficiency of token-by-token generation hinders real-world deployment in latency-sensitive recommender systems. Latent reasoning has emerged as an effective paradigm in LLMs, performing multi-step inference in a continuous hidden-state space to achieve stronger reasoning at lower cost. However, this paradigm remains underexplored in mainstream generative recommendation. Adapting it reveals three unique challenges: (1) the gap between prior-less Semantic ID (SID) symbols and continuous latent reasoning - SIDs lack pre-trained semantics, hindering joint optimization; (2) representation drift due to a lack of reasoning chain supervision; and (3) the suboptimality of applying a globally fixed reasoning depth. To address these, we propose LASAR (Latent Adaptive Semantic Aligned Reasoning), an SFT-then-RL framework. First, we bridge this gap via two-stage training: Stage 1 grounds SID semantics before Stage 2 introduces latent reasoning, ensuring efficient convergence. Second, we mitigate representation drift through explicit CoT semantic alignment. Step-wise bidirectional KL divergence constrains the latent reasoning trajectory using hidden-state anchors extracted from CoT text, while a Policy Head predicts per-sample reasoning depth. Third, during the GRPO-based RL phase, terminal-only KL alignment accommodates variable-length reasoning, and REINFORCE optimizes the Policy Head to dynamically allocate steps. This nearly halves the average latent step count while simultaneously improving recommendation quality. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LASAR outperforms all baselines. It adds marginal inference latency and is roughly 20 times faster than generating explicit CoT text.

Multi-Aspect Cross-modal Quantization for Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a new paradigm in recommender systems. This approach relies on quantized representations to discretize item features, modeling users' historical interactions as sequences of discrete tokens. Based on these tokenized sequences, GR predicts the next item by employing next-token prediction methods. The challenges of GR lie in constructing high-quality semantic identifiers (IDs) that are hierarchically organized, minimally conflicting, and conducive to effective generative model training. However, current approaches remain limited in their ability to harness multimodal information and to capture the deep and intricate interactions among diverse modalities, both of which are essential for learning high-quality semantic IDs and for effectively training GR models. To address this, we propose Multi-Aspect Cross-modal quantization for generative Recommendation (MACRec), which introduces multimodal information and incorporates it into both semantic ID learning and generative model training from different aspects. Specifically, we first introduce cross-modal quantization during the ID learning process, which effectively reduces conflict rates and thus improves codebook usability through the complementary integration of multimodal information. In addition, to further enhance the generative ability of our GR model, we incorporate multi-aspect cross-modal alignments, including the implicit and explicit alignments. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three well-known recommendation datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

TextAtlas5M: A Large-scale Dataset for Dense Text Image Generation

Text-conditioned image generation has gained significant attention in recent years and are processing increasingly longer and comprehensive text prompt. In everyday life, dense and intricate text appears in contexts like advertisements, infographics, and signage, where the integration of both text and visuals is essential for conveying complex information. However, despite these advances, the generation of images containing long-form text remains a persistent challenge, largely due to the limitations of existing datasets, which often focus on shorter and simpler text. To address this gap, we introduce TextAtlas5M, a novel dataset specifically designed to evaluate long-text rendering in text-conditioned image generation. Our dataset consists of 5 million long-text generated and collected images across diverse data types, enabling comprehensive evaluation of large-scale generative models on long-text image generation. We further curate 3000 human-improved test set TextAtlasEval across 3 data domains, establishing one of the most extensive benchmarks for text-conditioned generation. Evaluations suggest that the TextAtlasEval benchmarks present significant challenges even for the most advanced proprietary models (e.g. GPT4o with DallE-3), while their open-source counterparts show an even larger performance gap. These evidences position TextAtlas5M as a valuable dataset for training and evaluating future-generation text-conditioned image generation models.

LD-DETR: Loop Decoder DEtection TRansformer for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection aim to find corresponding content in the video based on a text query. Existing models usually first use contrastive learning methods to align video and text features, then fuse and extract multimodal information, and finally use a Transformer Decoder to decode multimodal information. However, existing methods face several issues: (1) Overlapping semantic information between different samples in the dataset hinders the model's multimodal aligning performance; (2) Existing models are not able to efficiently extract local features of the video; (3) The Transformer Decoder used by the existing model cannot adequately decode multimodal features. To address the above issues, we proposed the LD-DETR model for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection tasks. Specifically, we first distilled the similarity matrix into the identity matrix to mitigate the impact of overlapping semantic information. Then, we designed a method that enables convolutional layers to extract multimodal local features more efficiently. Finally, we fed the output of the Transformer Decoder back into itself to adequately decode multimodal information. We evaluated LD-DETR on four public benchmarks and conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. Our model outperforms the State-Of-The-Art models on QVHighlight, Charades-STA and TACoS datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/qingchen239/ld-detr.

QTG-VQA: Question-Type-Guided Architectural for VideoQA Systems

In the domain of video question answering (VideoQA), the impact of question types on VQA systems, despite its critical importance, has been relatively under-explored to date. However, the richness of question types directly determines the range of concepts a model needs to learn, thereby affecting the upper limit of its learning capability. This paper focuses on exploring the significance of different question types for VQA systems and their impact on performance, revealing a series of issues such as insufficient learning and model degradation due to uneven distribution of question types. Particularly, considering the significant variation in dependency on temporal information across different question types, and given that the representation of such information coincidentally represents a principal challenge and difficulty for VideoQA as opposed to ImageQA. To address these challenges, we propose QTG-VQA, a novel architecture that incorporates question-type-guided attention and adaptive learning mechanism. Specifically, as to temporal-type questions, we design Masking Frame Modeling technique to enhance temporal modeling, aimed at encouraging the model to grasp richer visual-language relationships and manage more intricate temporal dependencies. Furthermore, a novel evaluation metric tailored to question types is introduced. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.