ML: Retrieval

Machine-learning ideas tagged Retrieval in the ML taxonomy of the Math2NN corpus.

32 ideas found

Unverified 2026

Uniform PEP selective decoding

Replace raw neural scores with randomized pairwise-error probabilities relative to a reference candidate distribution. Use a fixed PEP threshold to accept, abstain, or form a variable-size candidate list; exact uniformity under the reference law makes the threshold interpretable independently of the model's score scale and robust to ties.

Useful5/10
Difficulty4/10
Novelty5/10
Paper: One-Shot Information Theory via the Pairwise Error Probability: Lossy, Joint Source-Channel, Erasure, and Multiuser Coding arXiv:2608.15169
Unverified 2026

Spherical anti-additive-collision embeddings

Constrain an embedding table to the unit sphere and penalize repeated or nearly repeated pair sums. This discourages additive quadruples a+b approximately equal to c+d, reducing unwanted linear structure and making distinct tokens less interchangeable under downstream composition. The theorem provides a geometric target: on a sphere, the affine-line concentration factor is bounded by two, so exact additive energy should scale close to n squared rather than the much larger values produced by…

Useful5/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty8/10
Paper: Near diagonal additive energy bound for points on algebraic surfaces arXiv:2608.14467
Unverified 2026

Convex-lifted additive codebook

Encode each scalar or discrete code t by the strictly convex lift γ(t)=(t,t²), optionally followed by a learned linear projection and normalization. Because three-code sums on this curve have only near-minimal additive energy, the representation should produce fewer collisions when a model composes three tokens, codes, or retrieved items by addition.

Useful5/10
Difficulty3/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Near optimal three-fold additive energy bound for points on convex curves arXiv:2608.12316
Unverified 2026

Signed-triangle Nyström lookahead

Replace one-step greedy landmark selection in Nyström attention or kernel compression with a restricted pairwise-lookahead rule. The lookahead is motivated by the paper's explicit obstruction: a signed triangle can make individual column gains exhibit increasing rather than diminishing returns, so the best next column need not belong to the best pair.

Useful5/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty4/10
Paper: Nyström Error Beyond $M$-Matrices: A Minimal Diagonally Dominant Obstruction arXiv:2607.19282
Unverified 2026

Snowflake negative-type similarity regularizer

Augment a representation-learning objective with penalties enforcing the paper's four-point metric inequalities, and use an exponential snowflake kernel instead of unconstrained dot-product similarity. The experiment tests whether geometrically valid similarities improve retrieval or attention stability at equal model size and compute.

Useful5/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty6/10
Paper: Lorentzian polynomials and matroids over triangular hyperfields 2: Analytic aspects arXiv:2607.15375
Unverified 2026

Compact Abelian Graph Positional Codes

Replace one-hot node IDs or large positional encodings in a GNN with coordinates from a compact abelian Cayley graph. The coordinates preserve graph-shortest-path geometry exactly, while Fourier characters of cyclic factors provide smooth neural features with fewer channels.

Useful5/10
Difficulty7/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Dimension and Order Bounds for Isometric Embeddings of Graphs into Abelian Cayley Graphs, and the Abelian Dividend arXiv:2607.07939
Unverified 2026

Stochastic-order monotone attention ratios

Build an attention or positive-mixture module whose output ratio at two control settings is provably monotone in an ordered index such as token distance, retrieval rank, or discretized uncertainty. Use normalized-positive-series identities to replace an unstable quotient derivative with a difference of expectations, and penalize violations of the resulting stochastic-order condition during training.

Useful5/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty5/10
Paper: A Probabilistic Sign Rule for Quotients of Positive Series and Integral Transforms arXiv:2607.02511
Unverified 2026

Polynomial-expander feature mixer

Insert a fixed polynomial mixer before an MLP or retrieval index for tuples of discrete features. The mixer maps n+2 bounded scalar feature codes to one or several expanded scalar codes, and the paper's theorem guarantees that its image cannot collapse below order |A|^n when all coordinates come from a finite alphabet A. Use multiple independent permutations or coefficient choices to obtain a vector representation while retaining the deterministic algebraic structure.

Useful4/10
Difficulty4/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: On polynomial expanders with many variables arXiv:2608.26349