@inproceedings{luo-etal-2026-learning,
title = "Learning When to Think: Utility-Guided Adaptive Reasoning for Efficient Text Retrieval",
author = "Luo, Yingtao and
Zhao, Kangyi and
Du, Shiyi and
Li, Yubo",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1617/",
pages = "34424--34434",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Reasoning-conditioned embeddings can improve retrieval by progressively refining semantic constraints. However, additional reasoning may introduce over-generalized or semantically noisy abstractions that weaken retrieval specificity. Existing methods largely supervise reasoning through final retrieval outcomes, providing limited guidance over the refinement process itself. We propose AURA, a framework that directly supervises intermediate reasoning states according to how well they separate relevant documents from hard distractors. AURA further trains a lightweight utility estimator over prefix-conditioned embeddings to adapt reasoning depth at inference time. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, AURA-4B achieves 34.7 average nDCG@10 while using 2.8 reasoning steps and 96 generated tokens per query. Under matched deployment conditions, adaptive stopping reduces latency from 4.6 to 0.76 seconds relative to full-trajectory reasoning. Results on MS MARCO further suggest that this specialization need not substantially degrade conventional in-domain retrieval."
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<abstract>Reasoning-conditioned embeddings can improve retrieval by progressively refining semantic constraints. However, additional reasoning may introduce over-generalized or semantically noisy abstractions that weaken retrieval specificity. Existing methods largely supervise reasoning through final retrieval outcomes, providing limited guidance over the refinement process itself. We propose AURA, a framework that directly supervises intermediate reasoning states according to how well they separate relevant documents from hard distractors. AURA further trains a lightweight utility estimator over prefix-conditioned embeddings to adapt reasoning depth at inference time. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, AURA-4B achieves 34.7 average nDCG@10 while using 2.8 reasoning steps and 96 generated tokens per query. Under matched deployment conditions, adaptive stopping reduces latency from 4.6 to 0.76 seconds relative to full-trajectory reasoning. Results on MS MARCO further suggest that this specialization need not substantially degrade conventional in-domain retrieval.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Learning When to Think: Utility-Guided Adaptive Reasoning for Efficient Text Retrieval
%A Luo, Yingtao
%A Zhao, Kangyi
%A Du, Shiyi
%A Li, Yubo
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F luo-etal-2026-learning
%X Reasoning-conditioned embeddings can improve retrieval by progressively refining semantic constraints. However, additional reasoning may introduce over-generalized or semantically noisy abstractions that weaken retrieval specificity. Existing methods largely supervise reasoning through final retrieval outcomes, providing limited guidance over the refinement process itself. We propose AURA, a framework that directly supervises intermediate reasoning states according to how well they separate relevant documents from hard distractors. AURA further trains a lightweight utility estimator over prefix-conditioned embeddings to adapt reasoning depth at inference time. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, AURA-4B achieves 34.7 average nDCG@10 while using 2.8 reasoning steps and 96 generated tokens per query. Under matched deployment conditions, adaptive stopping reduces latency from 4.6 to 0.76 seconds relative to full-trajectory reasoning. Results on MS MARCO further suggest that this specialization need not substantially degrade conventional in-domain retrieval.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1617/
%P 34424-34434
Markdown (Informal)
[Learning When to Think: Utility-Guided Adaptive Reasoning for Efficient Text Retrieval](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1617/) (Luo et al., Findings 2026)
ACL