Temporal IR

Understanding how events evolve over time is essential for search engines handling queries about trending news. We present QDET (Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization), a production system deployed on Baidu Search that constructs focused event timelines to explain specific query events. Unlike traditional topic-centric approaches that aim for comprehensive coverage, QDET identifies and organizes sub-events closely relevant to the query from noisy candidate sets formed by millions of documents retrieved daily. QDET incorporates two key innovations: (1) multi-task supervised fine-tuning with three auxiliary tasks-temporal ordering, causal judgment, and timeline completion-that enable compact models to match the performance of much larger general-purpose models in specialized domains; (2) reinforcement learning-based event concise summarization that enforces strict length constraints while maintaining semantic quality, achieving 88.2% length compliance and outperforming 671B-scale models by 7.7 points in constraint satisfaction. Our fine-tuned 7B parameter model achieves 76.2% F1 score on timeline summarization, slightly surpassing the zero-shot performance of DeepSeek-R1-671B (76.1% F1) while using only 1% of its parameters-demonstrating that domain-specific optimization enables production-ready models with comparable quality at drastically reduced computational costs. Online A/B tests on Baidu Search validate real-world effectiveness, showing 5.5% CTR improvement, 4.6% longer dwell time, and 4.4% deeper exploration compared to single-task baselines. We further demonstrate that timeline understanding transfers to heat prediction, confirming effective knowledge transfer to downstream tasks.

Temporal knowledge-graph data marketplaces face three coupled failures in static designs: stale hybrid index shortcuts reduce recall as edges evolve, stationary Shapley pricing misattributes value after distribution shifts, and uncoordinated agents over-consume a shared differential-privacy budget. We present CHRONOS, a three-layer architecture providing a unified treatment of these challenges with explicit public and private separation. Layer one applies neural-ODE temporal decay to shortcut edges, providing a per-query expected recall-loss bound of Big-O of Pq lambda delta t, with a monotone-envelope guarantee reducing bound looseness to 1.8 to 3.2 times observed loss. Layer two conditions Shapley valuation on detected changepoints and provides finite-sample error guarantees under noise. Layer three uses EXP3-IX to achieve Big-O of the square root of T log T regret while enforcing epsilon and delta differential privacy via moments accounting. CHRONOS releases a privatized affinity matrix per epoch using the Gaussian mechanism; all retrieval and ranking are post-processing, incurring no extra privacy cost. We provide multi-epoch settlement, scalability analysis for 500 sellers, and comparisons against accelerated baselines. Across four benchmarks, CHRONOS shows 0.937 recall at ten, 2.74 queries per second, 161 ms latency, and total epsilon of 4.25 at delta of 10 to the power of negative 6 under zCDP composition. These results indicate a competitive operating point. A limitation is that at this privacy level, released valuations remain noise-dominated; utility derives primarily from public index routing and adaptive scheduling driven by low-sensitivity statistics.

Keyframe selection is a direct way to provide verifiable visual evidence for long-video question answering (QA). Queries differ in what they require, and finding the right frames depends on knowing what to look for. Existing keyframe selectors either score every frame against a single query, or decompose the query into a fixed schema evaluated by a single visual tool. We propose ToolMerge, a keyframe retrieval method based on decomposition and merging: an Large Language Model (LLM) based planner decomposes the query into tool calls and specifies how their per-tool rankings are merged using boolean operators. To evaluate retrieval directly, we construct Molmo-2 Moments (M2M), a benchmark in which every question is anchored to a specific time interval by construction. Across QA, question retrieval, and caption retrieval, ToolMerge is competitive with prior keyframe selectors, most notably on caption retrieval, outperforming other methods by 5%. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/michalsr/ToolMerge .

Large language models are increasingly used for legal research, yet their fixed training cutoffs and reliance on static parametric knowledge are at odds with the evolving nature of statutory law. We study two temporal failure modes: post-cutoff staleness, where models apply superseded rules after legislative amendments, and recency bias, where models prefer newer provisions even when a historical version governs the fact pattern. To this end, we present a benchmark of 312 expert-validated, time-sensitive German statutory QA pairs spanning three categories: Post-Cutoff Amendment Questions, Pre-Amendment Questions, and Multi-Provision Pre-Amendment Questions. We evaluate five LLMs by OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek under four inference settings: Vanilla, Web-search, and two retrieval-augmented variants that enforce temporal validity via a fact date extraction and version filtering. Using an LLM-as-a-judge validated against human expert ratings, we find severe degradation in the Vanilla post-cutoff setting. Both RAG approaches substantially improve performance across all question types, while web search yields unstable gains and exhibits a marked recency bias on historically anchored tasks. Our results indicate that reliable legal QA requires treating temporal validity as a hard constraint.

Co-citation structure is widely assumed to provide stable retrieval signal in legal information systems. We test this assumption longitudinally by constructing UA-StatuteRetrieval, a benchmark that measures co-citation predictability across 20 annual snapshots (2007-2026) of 396 million codex citations from 101 million Ukrainian court decisions. Using a leave-one-out protocol over the full bipartite citation graph, we find that Adamic-Adar MRR declines 33% on a fixed set of articles (from 0.43 to 0.29) and 47% under a train/test temporal split (from 0.51 to 0.27) confirming genuine temporal decay rather than compositional shift or evaluation artifact. The decay is non-uniform: criminal procedure maintains stable co-citation patterns (MRR ~0.40), while civil law degrades from 0.35 to 0.15, coinciding with the 2017 judicial reform. Hub articles (>100K citations) resist decay, but mid-frequency articles (1K-10K) -- the practical retrieval frontier lose half their predictability. A BM25 text baseline decays even faster (31%), and embedding drift analysis with E5-large reveals a 4.3% semantic shift in how articles are cited, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observed decay. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-statute-retrieval.

In commercial web search, aligning content freshness with user intent remains challenging due to the highly varied lifespans of information. Traditional industrial approaches rely on static time-window filtering, resulting in "one-size-fits-all" rankings where content may be chronologically recent but semantically expired. To address the limitation, we present a novel Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Query-Aware Dynamic Content Expiration Prediction Framework deployed in Baidu search, reformulating timeliness as a dynamic validity inference task. Our framework extracts fine-grained temporal contexts from documents and leverages LLMs to deduce a query-specific "validity horizon"-a semantic boundary defining when information becomes obsolete based on user intent. Integrated with robust hallucination mitigation strategies to ensure reliability, our approach has been evaluated through offline and online A/B testing on live production traffic. Results demonstrate significant improvements in search freshness and user experience metrics, validating the effectiveness of LLM-driven reasoning for solving semantic expiration at an industrial scale.

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to localize temporal segments in videos that correspond to a natural language query, but typically assumes only a single matching moment for each query. This assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios, where queries may correspond to multiple or no moments. Thus, we formulate Generalized Moment Retrieval (GMR), a unified setting that requires retrieving the complete set of relevant moments or predicting an empty set. To enable systematic study of GMR, we introduce Soccer-GMR, a large-scale benchmark built on challenging soccer videos that reflect general GMR scenarios, with realistic negative and positive queries. The benchmark is constructed via a duration-flexible semi-automated pipeline with human verification, enabling scalable data generation while maintaining high annotation quality. We further design a unified evaluation protocol with complementary metrics tailored for null-set rejection, positive-query localization, and end-to-end GMR performance. Finally, we establish strong baselines across two modeling paradigms: a lightweight plug-and-play GMR adapter for discriminative VMR models, and a GMR-tailored GRPO reward for fine-tuning multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Extensive experiments show consistent gains across all metrics and expose key limitations of current methods, positioning GMR as a more realistic and challenging benchmark for video-language understanding.

Long-term conversational memory requires retrieving evidence scattered across multiple sessions, yet single-pass retrieval fails on temporal and multi-hop questions. Existing iterative methods refine queries via generated content or document-level signals, but none explicitly diagnoses the evidence gap, namely what is missing from the accumulated retrieval set, leaving query refinement untargeted. We present EviMem, combining IRIS (Iterative Retrieval via Insufficiency Signals), a closed-loop framework that detects evidence gaps through sufficiency evaluation, diagnoses what is missing, and drives targeted query refinement, with LaceMem (Layered Architecture for Conversational Evidence Memory), a coarse-to-fine memory hierarchy supporting fine-grained gap diagnosis. On LoCoMo, EviMem improves Judge Accuracy over MIRIX on temporal (73.3% to 81.6%) and multi-hop (65.9% to 85.2%) questions at 4.5x lower latency. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EviMem.

Modern retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems treat vector embeddings as static, context-free artifacts: an embedding has no notion of when it was created, how trustworthy its source is, or which other embeddings depend on it. This flattening of knowledge has a measurable cost: recent work on VersionRAG reports that conventional RAG achieves only 58% accuracy on versioned technical queries, because retrieval returns semantically similar but temporally invalid content. We propose SmartVector, a framework that augments dense embeddings with three explicit properties -- temporal awareness, confidence decay, and relational awareness -- and a five-stage lifecycle modeled on hippocampal-neocortical memory consolidation. A retrieval pipeline replaces pure cosine similarity with a four-signal score that mixes semantic relevance, temporal validity, live confidence, and graph-relational importance. A background consolidation agent detects contradictions, builds dependency edges, and propagates updates along those edges as graph-neural-network-style messages. Confidence is governed by a closed-form function combining an Ebbinghaus-style exponential decay, user-feedback reconsolidation, and logarithmic access reinforcement. We formalize the model, relate it to temporal knowledge graph embedding, agentic memory architectures, and uncertainty-aware RAG, and present a reference implementation. On a reproducible synthetic versioned-policy benchmark of 258 vectors and 138 queries, SmartVector roughly doubles top-1 accuracy over plain cosine RAG (62.0% vs. 31.0% on a held-out split), drops stale-answer rate from 35.0% to 13.3%, cuts Expected Calibration Error by nearly 2x (0.244 vs. 0.470), reduces re-embedding cost per single-word edit by 77%, and is robust across contradiction-injection rates from 0% to 75%.

Knowledge graphs used for retrieval treat all facts as equally current. Existing temporal approaches apply uniform decay, using a single forgetting curve regardless of knowledge type. We show this is fundamentally misspecified: different knowledge types exhibit different temporal dynamics, and the core retrieval problem is not latency or throughput but identifying what is important at query time. We propose a hierarchical framework that replaces uniform decay with a continuous decay surface parameterized by two orthogonal signals: velocity (how frequently a concept is observed) and volatility (how much the value changes between observations, measured via embedding distance). The decay surface is decomposed into three learnable levels: domain-level parameters capture universal patterns (some predicates are inherently permanent, others inherently transient), context-level parameters capture setting-dependent variation, and entity-level adaptation personalizes decay to specific subjects. All parameters emerge from data through survival analysis on observed value lifetimes, requiring no predefined taxonomies or domain expertise. We formulate edge lifetime as a survival problem where the event is value supersession (a meaningfully different value replacing the current one), distinct from mere re-observation. Experiments on synthetic temporal knowledge graphs demonstrate recovery of planted hierarchical parameters (HDBSCAN ARI = 1.0). Validation on 107 Wikipedia articles and 1,163 patient records from the Synthea clinical EHR simulator shows that velocity-volatility clusters emerge naturally, align with observable persistence patterns, and near-universally exhibit the Lindy effect (Weibull shape k < 1). Uniform decay performs 18x worse than no temporal weighting. Heterogeneous decay recovers from this, with each hierarchy level contributing measurable improvement.

Multivariate time series forecasting often struggles to capture long-range dependencies due to fixed lookback windows. Retrieval-augmented forecasting addresses this by retrieving historical segments from memory, but existing approaches rely on a channel-agnostic strategy that applies the same references to all variables. This neglects inter-variable heterogeneity, where different channels exhibit distinct periodicities and spectral profiles. We propose CRAFT (Channel-wise retrieval-augmented forecasting), a novel framework that performs retrieval independently for each channel. To ensure efficiency, CRAFT adopts a two-stage pipeline: a sparse relation graph constructed in the time domain prunes irrelevant candidates, and spectral similarity in the frequency domain ranks references, emphasizing dominant periodic components while suppressing noise. Experiments on seven public benchmarks demonstrate that CRAFT outperforms state-of-the-art forecasting baselines, achieving superior accuracy with practical inference efficiency.

Time Series Language Models (TSLMs) promise reasoning over real-world temporal data, but their ability to retrieve and reason over long time-series remains largely untested. We introduce TS-Haystack, a multi-domain retrieval benchmark with ten event-grounded question-answering tasks over contexts from 100 seconds to 24 hours, spanning direct retrieval, temporal reasoning, multi-step reasoning, and contextual anomaly detection. Existing TSLMs exhibit severe long-context degradation: accuracy declines with context length, direct-tokenization models run out of memory beyond 100 seconds on high-rate signals, and time-interval-grounded tasks collapse toward near-zero accuracy when increasing the time-series lengths, aligning with existing literature on text and multi-modal long context retrieval. An agentic retrieval framework using specialized time-series classifier tools matches or outperforms SoTA TSLMs on 9 of 10 tasks, highlighting agentic retrieval as a promising approach for long-context TSLMs.

Memory enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to perceive, store, and use information from past dialogues, which is essential for personalization. However, existing methods fail to properly model the temporal dimension of memory in two aspects: 1) Temporal inaccuracy: memories are organized by dialogue time rather than their actual occurrence time; 2) Temporal fragmentation: existing methods focus on point-wise memory, losing durative information that captures persistent states and evolving patterns. To address these limitations, we propose Temporal Semantic Memory (TSM), a memory framework that models semantic time for point-wise memory and supports the construction and utilization of durative memory. During memory construction, it first builds a semantic timeline rather than a dialogue one. Then, it consolidates temporally continuous and semantically related information into a durative memory. During memory utilization, it incorporates the query's temporal intent on the semantic timeline, enabling the retrieval of temporally appropriate durative memories and providing time-valid, duration-consistent context to support response generation. Experiments on LongMemEval and LoCoMo show that TSM consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves up to 12.2% absolute improvement in accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We present a lightweight, model-agnostic temporal layer for RAG and use cybersecurity data to separate two problems that are usually conflated. For freshness, a half-life recency prior surfaces the newest relevant item where a cosine-only baseline scores 0.00; on a hard NVD CVE test, where the freshest item is not the most similar, it reaches Latest@10 of 0.60 versus 0.20 for a semantic-then-newest baseline, but stays partial and parameter-sensitive. For topic evolution, a heuristic tracker's low 0.08 macro-F1 is driven by the labeling rule, not the clusterer (HDBSCAN: 0.10; fixing the rule alone reaches 0.49, and 0.96 without clustering noise). We contribute a reproducible decoupling of the two, with honest real-data scope and a reference implementation.