18.7CLMay 28
The Architecture of Errors: From Universal Impossibility to Patch-Local LLM ReliabilityMikhail L. Arbuzov, Lee Mosbacker, Sisong Bei et al.
Universal LLM reliability is not a finite-library problem: across all possible tasks, tools, schemas, knowledge sources, and evaluator expectations, new intervention-distinguishable failure modes can appear without bound, so no finite intervention dictionary can guarantee bounded residual error for every such mode. But deployed systems do not operate over the whole universe. They operate inside operationally bounded patches (legal review, medical RAG, code repair, customer-support agents, contract extraction) with recurring tasks, schemas, tools, and evaluator expectations. Within such patches, empirical evidence suggests failures are sparse, repetitive, and concentrated in a small recurring catalogue, so reliability becomes a local catalogue-discovery and intervention-coverage problem rather than an exponential token-length problem. We formalize this transition with two propositions and one corollary. Proposition 1 is the worst-case-mode-wise negative result: no finite intervention dictionary covers every distinguishable failure mode of an unbounded domain. Corollary 1 is the inverse-discovery implication: the logarithmic upper bound on mode discovery cannot accommodate linearly more distinct tail modes without exponentially more observed hard-failure events. Proposition 2 is the positive patch-local result: under log active-mode exposure and head-heavy coverage, a sufficient per-hard-decision intervention budget grows polylogarithmically in sequence length and becomes domain-constant once the patch catalogue saturates. The framework relocates rather than dissolves long-context difficulty: where the number of hard decisions itself grows with task length, reliability remains hard; the contribution is to identify the on-axis intervention rather than to make those regimes easy.
96.4CLMay 6
Telegraph English: Semantic Prompt Compression via Structured Symbolic RewritingMikhail L. Arbuzov, Sisong Bei, Ziwei Dong et al.
We introduce Telegraph English (TE), a prompt-compression protocol that rewrites natural language into a symbol-rich, formally-structured dialect. Where token-deletion methods such as LLMLingua-2 train a classifier to delete low-importance tokens at a fixed ratio, TE performs a full semantic rewrite: it decomposes the input into atomic fact lines, substitutes verbose phrases with $\sim$40 logical and relational symbols, and lets the compression ratio adapt to each document's information density. A consequence of the line-structure rule is that compression and semantic chunking become the same operation -- each output line is an independently addressable fact, so the compressed representation is simultaneously a semantic index. We evaluate TE on 4{,}081 question-answer pairs from LongBench-v2 across five OpenAI models and two difficulty levels. At roughly 50\% token reduction, TE preserves 99.1\% accuracy on key facts with GPT-4.1 and outperforms LLMLingua-2 at matched compression ratios on every model and task tested. The gap widens on smaller models -- up to 11 percentage points on fine-detail tasks -- suggesting that explicit relational structure compensates for limited model capacity. We release the grammar specification, compression prompt, benchmark data, and reference implementation.
48.4IRMar 11
Tuning-Free LLM Can Build A Strong Recommender Under Sparse Connectivity And Knowledge Gap Via Extracting IntentWenqing Zheng, Noah Fatsi, Daniel Barcklow et al.
Recent advances in recommendation with large language models (LLMs) often rely on either commonsense augmentation at the item-category level or implicit intent modeling on existing knowledge graphs. However, such approaches struggle to capture grounded user intents and to handle sparsity and cold-start scenarios. In this work, we present LLM-based Intent Knowledge Graph Recommender (IKGR), a novel framework that constructs an intent-centric knowledge graph where both users and items are explicitly linked to intent nodes extracted by a tuning-free, RAG-guided LLM pipeline. By grounding intents in external knowledge sources and user profiles, IKGR canonically represents what a user seeks and what an item satisfies as first-class entities. To alleviate sparsity, we further introduce a mutual-intent connectivity densification strategy, which shortens semantic paths between users and long-tail items without requiring cross-graph fusion. Finally, a lightweight GNN layer is employed on top of the intent-enhanced graph to produce recommendation signals with low latency. Extensive experiments on public and enterprise datasets demonstrate that IKGR consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly on cold-start and long-tail slices, while remaining efficient through a fully offline LLM pipeline.
IRFeb 25
Revisiting RAG Retrievers: An Information Theoretic BenchmarkWenqing Zheng, Dmitri Kalaev, Noah Fatsi et al.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems rely critically on the retriever module to surface relevant context for large language models. Although numerous retrievers have recently been proposed, each built on different ranking principles such as lexical matching, dense embeddings, or graph citations, there remains a lack of systematic understanding of how these mechanisms differ and overlap. Existing benchmarks primarily compare entire RAG pipelines or introduce new datasets, providing little guidance on selecting or combining retrievers themselves. Those that do compare retrievers directly use a limited set of evaluation tools which fail to capture complementary and overlapping strengths. This work presents MIGRASCOPE, a Mutual Information based RAG Retriever Analysis Scope. We revisit state-of-the-art retrievers and introduce principled metrics grounded in information and statistical estimation theory to quantify retrieval quality, redundancy, synergy, and marginal contribution. We further show that if chosen carefully, an ensemble of retrievers outperforms any single retriever. We leverage the developed tools over major RAG corpora to provide unique insights on contribution levels of the state-of-the-art retrievers. Our findings provide a fresh perspective on the structure of modern retrieval techniques and actionable guidance for designing robust and efficient RAG systems.