5.4CLMay 25
Retrieval as Reasoning: Self-Evolving Agent-Native Retrieval via LLM-WikiHaoliang Ming, Feifei Li, Xiaoqing Wu et al.
LLM agents require retrieval to behave less like one-shot context fetching and more like reasoning: searching, reading, traversing, and deciding when evidence is sufficient. However, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) typically organizes external knowledge as flat chunks retrieved by embedding similarity, exposing a retrieval-as-lookup interface that is poorly aligned with tool-using agents. We propose LLM-Wiki, an agent-native retrieval system that operationalizes the Retrieval-as-Reasoning paradigm by treating external knowledge as a compilable, composable, and self-evolving structure rather than a static retrieval index. LLM-Wiki compiles documents into structured Wiki pages with bidirectional links, exposes search, read, and link-following operations through standard tool-calling interfaces, and introduces an Error Book for persistent structural and semantic self-correction. On HotpotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA, LLM-Wiki outperforms seven baselines, including HippoRAG 2, LightRAG, and GraphRAG, with gains of 2.0-8.1 F1 points over the strongest graph-based baseline and larger gains over Dense RAG. On AuthTrace, LLM-Wiki achieves the best overall accuracy, with especially strong gains on multi-document structured queries, showing that compilation-based knowledge organization generalizes beyond chain-style multi-hop reasoning.
6.0CLMay 25
AuthTrace: Diagnosing Evidence Construction in Thematically Dense Single-Author CorporaXiaoqing Wu, Feifei Li, Haoliang Ming et al.
Evidence construction systems--chunk retrieval, agent memory, knowledge-graph traversal, and thematic indexing--are evaluated on separate benchmarks with incompatible corpora and metrics, making cross-paradigm diagnosis impossible. We introduce AuthTrace, the first diagnostic benchmark that places all major paradigms on a single corpus and query set by exploiting the dual nature of single-author collections. Built on thematically dense corpora where all texts share style, topic, and vocabulary, AuthTrace provides 2,099 instances with exhaustive gold evidence and a fan-in gradient as the primary diagnostic axis. Comparing eight systems across two QA models, we find that (1) evidence recall--not precision--is the dominant predictor of answer quality (r = 0.96); (2) fan-in exposes paradigm-specific collapse patterns, with flat retrieval degrading 3x faster than structured-evidence systems; and (3) full-context prompting fails uniformly, establishing evidence construction as a necessary capacity beyond raw corpus exposure.
7.6DBJun 12
WikiKV: Schema-Evolving Path-Indexed Storage for Hierarchical Knowledge NavigationFeifei Li, Haoliang Ming, Zihan Li et al.
LLM-curated hierarchical knowledge bases, namely a tree-structured wiki whose nodes summarize an underlying corpus, have become a dominant substrate for retrieval-augmented applications, yet their storage layer is still treated as an implementation detail. This workload is hierarchical, query-intensive, and continuously evolving, and no existing storage model natively captures all three properties at once. We present WikiKV, a path-indexed key-value storage model purpose-built for this workload, comprising three components: (i) a data-driven schema that bootstraps the hierarchy via Intent-Anchored Schema Induction and refines it through Continuous Evolution Operators; (ii) a consistency protocol for the path-indexed storage model that precludes partial-read observations under concurrent offline rewrites without read-path locking; and (iii) a budgeted navigation operator whose search-accelerated routing reduces the expected number of LLM-assisted descent steps from d to O(1) while preserving anytime semantics with progressively refined answers. We evaluate WikiKV through real-world deployment for the WeChat Official Account AI Assistant and benchmark it against diverse baselines on the AuthTrace dataset, where it achieves balanced low per-operator latency across four query operators against relational, graph, and FS backends, and reaches 63.2% end-to-end answer correctness, exceeding multiple RAG baselines, with the gap widening on low- and high-fan-in multi-document questions. Ablation study further confirms the effectiveness of WikiKV's components.