UMass CIIR Recent Publications https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/rss/publication A listing of the latest publications from the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts. Critic-R: Improving Agentic Search using Instruction-tuned Retrievers with Natural Language Introspective Feedback https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1572 IR-1391: Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "Critic-R: Improving Agentic Search using Instruction-tuned Retrievers with Natural Language Introspective Feedback" To appear in the Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026), October 24-29, 2026, Budapest, Hungary. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Generative Information Retrieval for Real World https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1571 IR-1390: Hansi Zeng. "Generative Information Retrieval for Real World" Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT The Emergence of Relevance Through Axiomatic Attention Patterns During LoRA Fine-Tuning https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1564 IR-1385: James Allan, Atharva Nijasure, Matthew Perlman. "The Emergence of Relevance Through Axiomatic Attention Patterns During LoRA Fine-Tuning" To appear in the Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026), October 24-29, 2026, Budapest, Hungary. Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Evaluation of Agents under Simulated AI Marketplace Dynamics https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1557 IR-1378: Fernando Diaz, To Eun Kim, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "Evaluation of Agents under Simulated AI Marketplace Dynamics" In the Proceeding of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 2672–2683. Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Total Recall QA: A Verifiable Evaluation Suite for Deep Research Agents https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1556 IR-1377: Mahta Rafiee, Heydar Soudani, Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Faegheh Hasibi, Hamed Zamani. "Total Recall QA: A Verifiable Evaluation Suite for Deep Research Agents" In the Proceeding of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 3365-3373. Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Hedonic Neurons: A Mechanistic Mapping of Latent Coalitions in Transformer MLPs https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1555 IR-1376: James Allan, Tanya Chowdhury, Atharva Nijasure, Yair Zick. "Hedonic Neurons: A Mechanistic Mapping of Latent Coalitions in Transformer MLPs" In The Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 23–27, 2026. Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Uncertainty Quantification for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1554 IR-1375: Heydar Soudani, Hamed Zamani, Faegheh Hasibi. "Uncertainty Quantification for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning" In the Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 1665-1676. Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Learning to Reason for Multi-Step Retrieval of Personal Context in Personalized Question Answering https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1553 IR-1374: Maryam Amirizaniani, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "Learning to Reason for Multi-Step Retrieval of Personal Context in Personalized Question Answering" In the Proceeding of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 3580–3586. Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1552 IR-1373: Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering " In the Proceeding of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2026), July 20–24, 2026, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 1554–1565 Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Pathways of Thoughts: Multi-Directional Thinking for Long-form Personalized Question Answering https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1550 IR-1371: Alireza Salemi, Cheng Li, Mingyang Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei, Zhuowan Li, Weize Kong, Tao Chen, Hamed Zamani, Michael Bendersky. "Pathways of Thoughts: Multi-Directional Thinking for Long-form Personalized Question Answering" In the Proceedings of ACM Web Conference 2026 (WWW 2026), Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 13-17, 2026, pp. 5822-5833. Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT