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2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Efficient approximate nearest neighbor search on a raspberry Pi
Martinico S., Nardini F. M., Rulli C., Venturini R.
Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) search is a core task in Information Retrieval. However, the high computational demands and reliance on expensive infrastructures limit broader contributions to ANN research. Enabling efficient and effective ANN search on low-resource devices would allow researchers in low-income countries to participate in the ANN community, thereby democratizing the field. Despite its potential, the IR literature offers little work on the feasibility of ANN search under resource constraints. In this proposal, we explore efficient solutions for large-scale ANN search on low-resource devices. We report a preliminary experimentation highlighting current limitations and outlining future challenges.DOI: 10.1145/3726302.3730268
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE
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See at: dl.acm.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Neural lexical search with learned sparse retrieval
Yates A., Lassance C., Rulli C., Yang E., Macavaney S., Singh Siddharth A. K., Nguyen T., Lei Y.
Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) techniques use neural machinery to represent queries and documents as learned bags of words. In contrast with other neural retrieval techniques, such as generative retrieval and dense retrieval, LSR has been shown to be a remarkably robust, transferable, and efficient family of methods for retrieving high-quality search results. This half-day tutorial aims to provide an extensive overview of LSR, ranging from its fundamentals to the latest emerging techniques. By the end of the tutorial, attendees will be familiar with the important design decisions of an LSR system, know how to apply them to text and other modalities, and understand the latest techniques for retrieving with them efficiently. Website: https://lsr-tutorial.github.ioDOI: 10.1145/3726302.3731693
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See at: dl.acm.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Investigating the scalability of approximate sparse retrieval algorithms to massive datasets
Bruch S., Nardini F. M., Rulli C., Venturini R., Venuta L.
Learned sparse text embeddings have gained popularity due to their effectiveness in top-k retrieval and inherent interpretability. Their distributional idiosyncrasies, however, have long hindered their use in real-world retrieval systems. That changed with the recent development of approximate algorithms that leverage the distributional properties of sparse embeddings to speed up retrieval. Nonetheless, in much of the existing literature, evaluation has been limited to datasets with only a few million documents such as MsMarco. It remains unclear how these systems behave on much larger datasets and what challenges lurk in larger scales. To bridge that gap, we investigate the behavior of state-of-the-art retrieval algorithms on massive datasets. We compare and contrast the recently-proposed Seismic and graph-based solutions adapted from dense retrieval. We extensively evaluate Splade embeddings of 138M passages from MsMarco-v2 and report indexing time and other efficiency and effectiveness metrics.Source: LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, vol. 15574, pp. 437-445. Lucca, Italy, 06-10/04/2025
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-88714-7_43
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE
Metrics:


See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | link.springer.com Open Access | doi.org Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Journal article Open Access OPEN
Neural network compression using binarization and few full-precision weights
Nardini F. M., Rulli C., Trani S., Venturini R.
Quantization and pruning are two effective Deep Neural Network model compression methods. In this paper, we propose Automatic Prune Binarization (APB), a novel compression technique combining quantization with pruning. APB enhances the representational capability of binary networks using a few full-precision weights. Our technique jointly maximizes the accuracy of the network while minimizing its memory impact by deciding whether each weight should be binarized or kept in full precision. We show how to efficiently perform a forward pass through layers compressed using APB by decomposing it into a binary and a sparse-dense matrix multiplication. Moreover, we design two novel efficient algorithms for extremely quantized matrix multiplication on CPU, leveraging highly efficient bitwise operations. The proposed algorithms are 6.9× and 1.5× faster than available state-of-the-art solutions. We extensively evaluate APB on two widely adopted model compression datasets, namely CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. APB shows to deliver better accuracy/memory trade-off compared to state-of-the-art methods based on i) quantization, ii) pruning, and iii) a combination of pruning and quantization. APB also outperforms quantization in the accuracy/efficiency trade-off, being up to 2× faster than the 2-bits quantized model with no loss in accuracy.Source: INFORMATION SCIENCES, vol. 716
DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2025.122251
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4927691
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.08960
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE
Metrics:


See at: arXiv.org e-Print Archive Open Access | Information Sciences Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | www.sciencedirect.com Open Access | ZENODO Open Access | Software Heritage Restricted | Software Heritage Restricted | doi.org Restricted | doi.org Restricted | GitHub Restricted | GitHub Restricted | GitHub Restricted | GitHub Restricted | GitHub Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Efficient conversational search via topical locality in dense retrieval
Muntean Cristina Ioana, Nardini F. M., Perego R., Rocchietti G., Rulli C.
Pre-trained language models have been widely exploited to learn dense representations of documents and queries for information retrieval. While previous efforts have primarily focused on improving effectiveness and user satisfaction, response time remains a critical bottleneck of conversational search systems. To address this, we exploit the topical locality inherent in conversational queries, i.e., the tendency of queries within a conversation to focus on related topics. By leveraging query embedding similarities, we dynamically restrict the search space to semantically relevant document clusters, reducing computational complexity without compromising retrieval quality. We evaluate our approach on the TREC CAsT, 2019 and 2020 datasets using multiple embedding models and vector indexes, achieving improvements in processing speed of up to 10.3X with little loss in performance (4.3X without any loss). Our results show that the proposed system effectively handles complex, multi-turn queries with high precision and efficiency, offering a practical solution for real-time conversational search.DOI: 10.1145/3726302.3730186
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2504.21507
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE, Future Artificial Intelligence Research” - Spoke 1” Human-centered AI”
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See at: arXiv.org e-Print Archive Open Access | dl.acm.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | doi.org Restricted | doi.org Restricted | Archivio della Ricerca - Università di Pisa Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
FoodSafeSum: enabling natural language processing applications for food safety document summarization and analysis
Bakagianni J., Randl K., Rocchietti G., Rulli C., Nardini F. M., Henriksson A., Trani S., Romanova A., Pavlopoulos J.
Food safety demands timely detection, regulation, and public communication, yet the lack of structured datasets hinders Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. We present and release a new dataset of human-written and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated summaries of food safety documents, plus food safety related metadata. We evaluate its utility on three NLP tasks directly reflecting food safety practices: multilabel classification for organizing documents into domain-specific categories; document retrieval for accessing regulatory and scientific evidence; and question answering via retrieval-augmented generation that improves factual accuracy. We show that LLM summaries perform comparably or better than human ones across tasks. We also demonstrate clustering of summaries for event tracking and compliance monitoring. This dataset enables NLP applications that support core food safety practices, including the organization of regulatory and scientific evidence, monitoring of compliance issues, and communication of risks to the public.DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.911
Project(s): MIS
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See at: aclanthology.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | doi.org Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Journal article Open Access OPEN
ChatGPT versus modest large language models: an extensive study on benefits and drawbacks for conversational search
Rocchietti G., Rulli C., Nardini F. M., Muntean Cristina Ioana, Perego R., Frieder O.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective in modeling text syntactic and semantic content, making them a strong choice to perform conversational query rewriting. While previous approaches proposed NLP-based custom models, requiring significant engineering effort, our approach is straightforward and conceptually simpler. Not only do we improve effectiveness over the current state-of-the-art, but we also curate the cost and efficiency aspects. We explore the use of pre-trained LLMs fine-tuned to generate quality user query rewrites, aiming to reduce computational costs while maintaining or improving retrieval effectiveness. As a first contribution, we study various prompting approaches - including zero, one, and few-shot methods - with ChatGPT (e.g., gpt-3.5-turbo). We observe an increase in the quality of rewrites leading to improved retrieval. We then fine-tuned smaller open LLMs on the query rewriting task. Our results demonstrate that our fine-tuned models, including the smallest with 780 million parameters, achieve better performance during the retrieval phase than gpt-3.5-turbo. To fine-tune the selected models, we used the QReCC dataset, which is specifically designed for query rewriting tasks. For evaluation, we used the TREC CAsT datasets to assess the retrieval effectiveness of the rewrites of both gpt-3.5-turbo and our fine-tuned models. Our findings show that fine-tuning LLMs on conversational query rewriting datasets can be more effective than relying on generic instruction-tuned models or traditional query reformulation techniques.Source: IEEE ACCESS, vol. 13, pp. 15253-15271
DOI: 10.1109/access.2025.3529741
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See at: IEEE Access Open Access | IEEE Access Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | ieeexplore.ieee.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Effective inference-free retrieval for learned sparse representations
Nardini F. M., Nguyen T., Rulli C., Venturini R., Yates A.
Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) is an effective IR approach that exploits pre-trained language models for encoding text into a learned bag of words. Several efforts in the literature have shown that sparsity is key to enabling a good trade-off between the efficiency and effectiveness of the query processor. To induce the right degree of sparsity, researchers typically use regularization techniques when training LSR models. Recently, new efficient-inverted index-based-retrieval engines have been proposed, leading to a natural question: has the role of regularization changed in training LSR models? In this paper, we conduct an extended evaluation of regularization approaches for LSR where we discuss their effectiveness, efficiency, and out-of-domain generalization capabilities. We first show that regularization can be relaxed to produce more effective LSR en- coders. We also show that query encoding is now the bottleneck limiting the overall query processor performance. To remove this bottleneck, we advance the state-of-the-art of inference-free LSR by proposing Learned Inference-free Retrieval (Li-Lsr). At training time, Li-Lsr learns a score for each token, casting the query encoding step into a seamless table lookup. Our approach yields state-of-the-art effectiveness for both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation,surpassing Splade-v3-Doc by 1 point of mRR@10 on MsMarco and 1.8 points of nDCG@10 on Beir.DOI: 10.1145/3726302.3730185
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE
Metrics:


See at: dl.acm.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
kANNolo: sweet and smooth approximate k-nearest neighbors search
Delfino L., Erriquez D., Martinico S., Nardini F. M., Rulli C., Venturini R.
Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) search is a crucial task in several applications like recommender systems and information retrieval. Current state-of-the-art ANN libraries, although being performance-oriented, often lack modularity and ease of use. This translates into them not being fully suitable for easy prototyping and testing of research ideas, an important feature to enable. We address these limitations by introducing kANNolo, a novel—research-oriented—ANN library written in Rust and explicitly designed to combine usability with performance effectively. kANNolo is the first ANN library that supports dense and sparse vector representations made available on top of different similarity measures, e.g., euclidean distance and inner product. Moreover, it also supports vector quantization techniques, e.g., Product Quantization, on top of the indexing strategies implemented. These functionalities are managed through Rust traits, allowing shared behaviors to be handled abstractly. This abstraction ensures flexibility and facilitates an easy integration of new components. In this work, we detail the architecture of kANNolo and demonstrate that its flexibility does not compromise performance. The experimental analysis shows that kANNolo achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of speed-accuracy trade-off while allowing fast and easy prototyping, thus making kANNolo a valuable tool for advancing ANN research. Source code available on GitHub: https://github.com/TusKANNy/kannolo.Source: LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, vol. 15575, pp. 400-406. Lucca, Italy, 6–10/04/2025
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-88717-8_29
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2501.06121
Project(s): EFRA via OpenAIRE
Metrics:


See at: arXiv.org e-Print Archive Open Access | dl.acm.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | doi.org Restricted | doi.org Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Other Open Access OPEN
ISTI-day 2025 Proceedings
Del Corso G., Pedrotti A., Federico G., Gennaro C., Carrara F., Amato G., Di Benedetto M., Gabrielli E., Belli D., Matrullo Zoe, Miori V., Tolomei Gabriele, Waheed T., Marchetti E., Calabrò Antonello., Rossetti G., Stella Massimo, Cazabet Rémy, Abramski K., Cau E., Citraro S., Failla A., Mesina V., Morini V., Pansanella V., Colantonio S., Germanese D., Pascali M. A., Bianchi L., Messina N., Falchi F., Barsellotti L., Pacini G., Cassese M., Puccetti G., Esuli A., Volpi L., Moreo Alejandro, Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Nguyen Dong, Broccia G., Ter Beek M. H., Ferrari A., Massink M., Belmonte Gina, Ciancia V., Papini O., Canapa G., Catricalà B., Manca M., Paternò F., Santoro C., Zedda E., Gallo S., Maenza S., Mattioli A., Simeoli L., Rucci D., Carlini E., Dazzi P., Kavalionak H., Mordacchini M., Rulli C., Muntean Cristina Ioana, Nardini F. M., Perego R., Rocchietti G., Lettich F., Renso C., Pugliese C., Casini G., Haldimann Jonas, Meyer Thomas, Assante M., Candela L., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Mangiacrapa F., Oliviero A., Pagano P., Panichi G., Peccerillo B., Procaccini M., Mannocci A., Manghi P., Lonetti F., Kang Dongjae, Di Giandomenico F., Jee Eunkyoung, Lazzini G., Conti F., Scopigno R., D'Acunto M., Moroni D., Cafiso M., Paradisi P., Callieri M., Pavoni G., Corsini M., De Falco A., Sala F., Saraceni Q., Gattiglia Gabriele
ISTI-Day is an annual information and networking event organized by the Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This event features an opening talk of the Director of the Dept. DIITET (Emilio F. Campana) as well as an overview of the Institute's activities presented by the ISTI Director (Roberto Scopigno). Those institutional segments are complemented by dedicated presentations and round tables featuring former staff members, as well as internal and external collaborators. To foster a network of knowledge and collaboration among newcomers, the 2025 ISTI Day edition also includes a large poster session that provides a comprehensive overview of current research activities. Each of the 13 laboratories contributes 1–3 posters, highlighting the most innovative work and offering early-career researchers a platform for discussion. Thus these proceedings include the posters selected for ISTI-Day 2025, reflecting the diverse and innovative nature of the Institute's research.

See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | www.isti.cnr.it Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted