Proper citation of relevant literature is essential for contextualising and validating scientific contributions. While current citation recommendation systems leverage local and global textual information, they often overlook the nuances of the human citation behaviour. Recent methods that incorporate such patterns improve performance but incur high computational costs and introduce systematic biases into downstream rerankers. To address this, we propose Profiler, a lightweight, non-learnable module that captures human citation patterns efficiently and without bias, significantly enhancing candidate retrieval. Furthermore, we identify a critical limitation in current evaluation protocol: the systems are assessed in a transductive setting, which fails to reflect real-world scenarios. We introduce a rigorous Inductive evaluation setting that enforces strict temporal constraints, simulating the recommendation of citations for newly authored papers in the wild. Finally, we present DAVINCI, a novel reranking model that integrates profiler-derived confidence priors with semantic information via an adaptive vector-gating mechanism. Our system achieves new state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior efficiency and generalisability.
Figures & tables
Dataset
Transductive
Inductive
# Contexts
# Papers
# Contexts
# Corpus
Train
Val
Test
Train
Val
Test
ACL-200
30,390
9,381
9,585
19,776
30,390
8,512
7,072
7,108
FTPR
9,363
492
6,814
4,837
9,363
472
5,918
3,313
RefSeer
3,521,582
124,911
126,593
624,957
3,521,582
117,724
105,411
580,059
arXiv
2,988,030
112,779
104,401
1,661,201
2,988,030
103,125
95,247
700,403
TABLE I: The impact of our rigorous inductive setting. Enforcing temporal consistency corrects the inflation in corpus and evaluation sets seen in standard benchmarks, resulting in a markedly smaller and more realistic set of documents for training and inference. ‘FTPR’: FullTextPeerRead.
Fig. 1: Navigating the performance landscape of the public profile enrichment on the FullTextPeerRead and ACL-200 validation sets. Each plot shows a different evaluation metric: (a) MRR, (b) Recall@10, and (c) NDCG@10.
Fig. 2: The architecture of our two-stage citation recommendation system. (1) The non-learnable Profiler performs a scalable retrieval by matching the query against a corpus of documents enriched with their public profile . (2) DAVINCI reranks the retrieved candidates using a vector-gated mechanism to integrate the discriminative retrieval priors with deep semantic features to produce a final ranked list of recommended papers for citation.
Model
Comp. Time
MRR
Recall@K
NDCG@K
10
50
300
10
50
300
ACL-200
Prefetcher
56.22m
21.14
40.33
65.37
86.98
24.57
30.11
33.30
Pref+Enr
64.43m
21.16
40.33
65.37
88.93
24.57
30.11
33.48
Profiler
2.52m
30.17
53.79
74.63
89.58
34.88
39.57
41.78
FullTextPeerRead
TABLE II: Our retrieval module ( Profiler ) consistently outperforms the SOTA baselines on all datasets across metrics and also with respect to the computational timing. Pref+Enr refers to sequential combination of Prefetcher followed by Enricher, leading to higher Recall@300 and NDCG@300 while keeping the same metric values for K=10 and K=50 as per its enrichment principle. Experiments are run on NVIDIA A100 DGX.
Model
MRR
Recall@K
NDCG@K
5
10
20
5
10
20
ACL-200
BM25
10.53
15.45
20.82
26.71
10.71
12.44
13.92
SciNCL
15.41
21.39
30.04
39.76
15.01
17.79
20.24
HAtten
45.53
58.93
68.24
75.78
47.32
50.34
52.25
SymTax
46.98
60.20
69.47
76.83
48.73
51.75
53.62
TABLE III: Performance comparison showing our end-to-end citation recommendation system ( Ours ) consistently outperforming all baselines.
Fig. 3: The performance variation for varied query composition when the profiling is disabled.
ACL-200
FTPR
Refseer
arXiv
ArSyTa
w/ Profiling
53.7
57.2
32.1
33.4
26.3
max attainable w/o Profiling
38.6
43.6
29.0
28.9
26.2
TABLE IV: Performance comparison w.r.t. Recall@10 on all datasets with profiling enabled versus the maximum attainable scores possible for any query composition when the profiling is disabled.
Model
MRR
Recall@K
NDCG@K
5
10
20
5
10
20
ACL-200
Ours
50.31
64.10
73.08
80.20
52.30
55.22
57.03
A1
48.42
62.42
71.32
78.38
50.44
53.34
55.13
A2
48.30
61.85
70.75
77.81
50.20
53.10
54.89
A3
49.46
62.67
71.83
78.49
51.27
54.26
55.96
TABLE V: Ablation analysis showing the impact of our design choices w.r.t. our complete system, namely, A1 (Semantics Only), A2 (Turned-off Discriminator), A3 (Softmax Normalisation), and A4 (Scalar Gating).
k
MRR
Recall@K
NDCG@K
5
10
20
5
10
20
ACL-200
50
46.97
59.62
67.02
71.75
49.04
51.46
52.67
100
48.92
62.08
70.36
76.46
50.92
53.62
55.17
300
50.31
64.10
73.08
80.20
52.30
55.22
57.03
1000
50.92
64.86
74.31
81.73
52.84
55.91
57.79
TABLE VI: Analysis showing the impact of number of candidates ( k ) on reranking performance. We found the value of 300 as an overall better choice for the final reranking performance with respect to the metrics and the computational overhead.
#
HAtten recommendation
SymTax recommendation
Ours recommendation
1
Moses: Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation
Moses: Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation
Minimum Error Rate Training in Statistical Machine Translation
2
Combining Multi-Engine Translations with Moses
Findings of the 2012 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
Statistical Phrase-Based Translation
3
SMT and SPE Machine Translation Systems for WMT’09
A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO MACHINE TRANSLATION
Moses: Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation
4
MANY: Open Source MT System Combination at WMT’10
Combining Multi-Engine Translations with Moses
Findings of the 2012 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation
5
Edinburgh’s Machine Translation Systems for European Language Pairs
Phrasetable Smoothing for Statistical Machine Translation
Improved Statistical Alignment Models
6
Toward Using Morphology in French-English Phrase-based SMT
Minimum Error Rate Training in Statistical Machine Translation
A STATISTICAL APPROACH TO MACHINE TRANSLATION
TABLE VII: Case study of citation recommendations for a sample from the ACL-200 dataset. The table contrasts the top-10 predictions from SOTA baseline models against our system, with ground-truth citation highlighted in bold to illustrate our model’s improved relevance. We can see that our model is successfully able to predict the correct citation by checking the abbrevation ‘MERT’ against the titles of the available candidates whereas the other systems just focus on the term (‘Moses’) in the abstract of the citing paper and the citation context, and use it for checking. # denotes the rank of the recommended citations.
Model
MRR
Recall@K
NDCG@K
5
10
20
5
10
20
ACL-200
DAVINCI
50.31
64.10
73.08
80.20
52.30
55.22
57.03
Qwen3-R-8B
36.44
50.96
63.06
72.83
38.02
41.94
44.42
bge-R-v2-m-40
33.52
45.27
55.23
64.70
34.55
37.78
40.17
FullTextPeerRead
TABLE VIII: Performance of DAVINCI (110M) vs. massive-scale rerankers. ‘R’: Reranker; ‘m’: minicpm. Despite being up to 70x smaller, our specialised model substantially outperforms general-purpose models like the state-of-the-art Qwen3-Reranker-8B across all datasets and metrics, demonstrating the merit of task-specific design over raw parameter scale.
Fig. 4: Python functions for constructing the query and candidate document strings from the available raw data. The create_query_from_citation function combines the citation context with metadata from the citing paper, while create_document_from_paper formats the candidate paper’s information.