Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2604.02431

SelRoute: Query-Type-Aware Routing for Long-Term Conversational Memory Retrieval

Matthew McKee
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Retrieving relevant past interactions from long-term conversational memory typically relies on large dense retrieval models (110M-1.5B parameters) or LLM-augmented indexing. We introduce SelRoute, a framework that routes each query to a specialized retrieval pipeline -- lexical, semantic, hybrid, or vocabulary-enriched -- based on its query type. On LongMemEval_M (Wu et al., 2024), SelRoute achieves Recall@5 of 0.800 with bge-base-en-v1.5 (109M parameters) and 0.786 with bge-small-en-v1.5 (33M parameters), compared to 0.762 for Contriever with LLM-generated fact keys. A zero-ML baseline using SQLite FTS5 alone achieves NDCG@5 of 0.692, already exceeding all published baselines on ranking quality -- a gap we attribute partly to implementation differences in lexical retrieval. Five-fold stratified cross-validation confirms routing stability (CV gap of 1.3-2.4 Recall@5 points; routes stable for 4/6 query types across folds). A regex-based query-type classifier achieves 83% effective routing accuracy, and end-to-end retrieval with predicted types (Recall@5 = 0.689) still outperforms uniform baselines. Cross-benchmark evaluation on 8 additional benchmarks spanning 62,000+ instances -- including MSDialog, LoCoMo, QReCC, and PerLTQA -- confirms generalization without benchmark-specific tuning, while exposing a clear failure mode on reasoning-intensive retrieval (RECOR Recall@5 = 0.149) that bounds the claim. We also identify an enrichment-embedding asymmetry: vocabulary expansion at storage time improves lexical search but degrades embedding search, motivating per-pipeline enrichment decisions. The full system requires no GPU and no LLM inference at query time.

Explore related subjects

cs.IR

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Matthew McKee. 2026-04-02. SelRoute: Query-Type-Aware Routing for Long-Term Conversational Memory Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02431

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Alignment for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems use cascaded stages with different objectives, feature spaces, and latency constraints. Optimizing pre-ranking and ranking separately can create cross-stage inconsistency: upstream models may filter out items preferred by downstream rankers, and independently tuned downstream fusion can offset upstream improvements. Existing multi-task fusion methods focus on multi-objective fusion within the ranking stage, and cross-stage methods typically only add a downstream score factor to upstream ranking. Joint optimization of fusion modules across both stages remains largely unexplored. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion model. First, the two fusion agents partially share input embeddings and are trained in a single computation graph, so gradients from either stage propagate through the shared representation and influence the other. Second, we introduce a dual-axis preference alignment objective: a vertical cross-stage consistency term transfers downstream pairwise preferences to the upstream fusion score, and a horizontal compact aggregation term reorganizes dozens of pairwise objectives over heterogeneous prior signals into bidirectional preference evidence. Third, we find that unconstrained end-to-end fusion optimization can exploit imbalances in item attribute distributions, over-concentrating on high-reward regions at the cost of other objectives. We therefore add an attribute group-relative regularization that computes advantages within attribute groups and normalizes the policy over the same groups, so uniformly promoting an entire high-reward group yields no optimization gain. Offline, UniRec consistently outperforms single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines. Online A/B tests show a 0.616\% gain in app usage duration. UniRec is fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents

State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

TimelyRAG: Semantic-Temporal Hybrid Retrieval for Time-Critical Question Answering in Overlapping-Evolving Documents

Although large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have advanced open-domain question answering (QA), they remain unreliable when documents evolve through amendments. Existing time-sensitive retrieval methods address only the disjoint-evolving environment, where each update is an independent snapshot. However, laws, policies, and regulations often operate in overlapping-evolving environments, where amendments override earlier clauses while preserving most content, creating strong semantic overlap across versions. We propose TimelyRAG, a retriever-agnostic framework that incorporates temporal distance into ranking to align queries with version-appropriate documents. We also introduce TimelyQABench, the first benchmark for regulation-heavy domains with overlapping-evolving challenges. Experiments show consistent gains, up to +28.6% in nDCG@10, highlighting the importance of temporal reasoning for reliable QA over evolving documents. All resources are available at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/TimelyRAG.

cs.IR↗