Retrieval shapes how language models access and cite knowledge in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In historical research, the goal is often to locate the exact record for a specific regnal month, where temporal alignment matters as much as topical relevance. This is especially challenging for Classical Chinese annals: time is encoded in terse, implicit, non-Gregorian reign phrases that are context-dependent, so semantically plausible evidence can still be temporally invalid. We introduce ChunQiuTR, a time-keyed retrieval benchmark built from the Spring and Autumn Annals and its exegetical tradition. It organizes records by month-level reign keys and includes chrono-near confounders that mimic real retrieval failures. We propose CTD (Calendrical Temporal Dual-encoder), a time-aware dual-encoder combining Fourier-based absolute context with relative offset biasing. Experiments show consistent gains over semantic dual-encoder baselines under time-keyed evaluation. We will release ChunQiuTR and code after the anonymity period.

Lifting stripped and highly optimized binaries to the canonical compiler intermediate representation (IR) enables program analysis when source code is unavailable. However, compiler optimizations severely distort control-flow and data-flow structure, making existing rule-based and LLM-based decompilation approaches brittle. We present BRIDGE, a system that reliably lifts optimized binaries to analysis-friendly compiler IR. BRIDGE combines control-flow-aware retrieval-augmented generation with feedback-driven verification. It uses pseudo-probe instrumentation to align optimized binary fragments with normalized IR semantics, and then employs an iterative refinement loop guided by static analysis and runtime feedback to improve executability and semantic consistency. We evaluate BRIDGE on HumanEval-Decompile and MBPP, lifting x86-64 and ARM64 binaries to LLVM IR. BRIDGE outperforms seven baselines, achieving an average of over 30% higher re-executability than the strongest general-purpose LLM baseline.

Contrastive learning is emerging as a powerful technique for extracting knowledge from unlabeled data. This technique requires a balanced mixture of two ingredients: positive (similar) and negative (dissimilar) samples. This is typically achieved by maintaining a queue of negative samples during training. Prior works in the area typically uses a fixed-length negative sample queue, but how the negative sample size affects the model performance remains unclear. The opaque impact of the number of negative samples on performance when employing contrastive learning aroused our in-depth exploration. This paper presents a momentum contrastive learning model with negative sample queue for sentence embedding, namely MoCoSE. We add the prediction layer to the online branch to make the model asymmetric and together with EMA update mechanism of the target branch to prevent the model from collapsing. We define a maximum traceable distance metric, through which we learn to what extent the text contrastive learning benefits from the historical information of negative samples. Our experiments find that the best results are obtained when the maximum traceable distance is at a certain range, demonstrating that there is an optimal range of historical information for a negative sample queue. We evaluate the proposed unsupervised MoCoSE on the semantic text similarity (STS) task and obtain an average Spearman’s correlation of 77.27%. Source code is available here.