Named Entity Recognition (NER) has achieved substantial progress since the advent of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, the recognition of long-tail and domain-specific entities remains challenging due to the deficiency in parametric knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a promising remedy by injecting external knowledge, but it also introduces noise and unnecessary cost when dealing with familiar cases. In this paper, we propose NE-R1, a novel framework for adaptive retrieval-augmented NER. We design a “retrieval-on-demand” mechanism for NER. Then we integrate it into models by a two-stage training method: (1) multi-task instruction tuning initialization; (2) end-to-end RL optimization with CoT. To achieve reasonable selection between parameterized and external knowledge, we design a multi-dimensional reward considering both accuracy and retrieval benefit. NE-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, with average improvements of 2.52 F1 points in in-domain evaluation and 1.18 F1 points in zero-shot cross-domain evaluation.

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and detailed feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments show that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art ad text generation approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since late May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, where the framework serves over 140k advertisers, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

The matching paradigm is fundamental to large-scale information retrieval and is widely used in industrial search and advertising systems. Existing approaches employ Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. To address this limitation, we propose a novel matching paradigm, termed the Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM (UGD). It integrates two-tower, single-tower, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning, enabling generative tasks to serve as auxiliary supervision for discriminative learning and facilitating distillation from single-tower to two-tower architectures through a multi-task fine-tuning mechanism. To satisfy online latency constraints, we further introduce a self-distillation variant of UGD with a KMeans-enhanced linearized RQVAE for prompt compression and quantization. This design compresses and quantizes landing-page documents during inference, improving serving efficiency and reducing storage overhead. Extensive experiments show that UGD achieves superior performance and strong practical value. The framework has been deployed in an industrial search engine serving hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of advertisers, significantly enhancing search experience. Open access upon publication.