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. 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 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 " To appear 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 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 Beyond a Million Tokens: Benchmarking and Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLMs https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1549 IR-1370: Mohammad Tavakoli, Alireza Salemi, Carrie Ye, Mohamed Abdalla, Hamed Zamani, Michael Ross. "Beyond a Million Tokens: Benchmarking and Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLMs" In the Proceedings of The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 23rd - 27th, 2026 Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Inferential Question Answering https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1543 IR-1364: Adam Jatowt, Jamshid Mozafari, Hamed Zamani, Guido Zuccon. "Inferential Question Answering" In the Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026 (WWW 2026), Dubai, UAE, April 13-17, 2026, pp. 2384-2395. Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Can Instructed Retrieval Models Really Support Exploration? https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1542 IR-1363: Piyush Maheshwari, Sheshera Mysore, Hamed Zamani. "Can Instructed Retrieval Models Really Support Exploration?" In the Proceedings of the 2026 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2026), Seattle, WA, March 22-26, 2026, pp. 508-513. Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 GMT RankSHAP: Shapley Value Based Feature Attributions for Learning to Rank https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1541 IR-1362: James Allan, Tanya Chowdhury, Yair Zick. "RankSHAP: Shapley Value Based Feature Attributions for Learning to Rank " In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025), Singapore, April 24, 2025. Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1540 IR-1361: Fernando Diaz, Andrew Drozdov, T.E. Kim, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities" In proceedings of the 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP ’24), Tokyo, Japan, December 9-12, 2024, pp. 299-302. Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 GMT The Second Tutorial on Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1539 IR-1360: Fernando Diaz, Andrew Drozdov, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani. "The Second Tutorial on Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities" In proceedings of 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’25), Padua, Italy, July 13-18, 2025, pp. 4130-4133. Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 GMT Scaling Sparse and Dense Retrieval in Decoder-Only LLMs https://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/pub/web/getpdf.php?id=1538 IR-1359: Hansi Zeng, Julian Killingback, Hamed Zamani. "Scaling Sparse and Dense Retrieval in Decoder-Only LLMs" in the Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’25), Padua, Italy, July 13-18, 2025, pp. 2679-2684. Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 GMT