Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Interactive retrieval with partial evidence constitutes a sequential information-acquisition problem: an agent must choose questions that acquire useful evidence for the next retrieval update. Existing systems train this decision by imitating an offline ordering of candidate QA pairs. However, a question's value depends on the response it elicits and its downstream effect on retrieval. We establish that candidate discriminativeness and perceived usefulness provide weak supervision for this objective, then introduce RAVEL, a retrieval-aware online reinforcement learning framework for interactive person re-identification. RAVEL initializes from supervised question generation, observes the current Top-4 candidates directly, and optimizes the question policy with rank feedback from the full question-answer-retrieval loop. Experiments on Interactive-PEDES show that RAVEL delivers progressively stronger retrieval performance across five interaction rounds. Further analysis shows that RAVEL allocates more of its interaction budget to localized open-ended prompts targeting specific attributes.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Sichuan University, University of California, Berkeley
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213901933
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