Navigation-Informed Embeddings: Dense-Retriever Adaptation from Agent Search Traces

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.15956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic retrieval workflows produce query, retrieval, and stopping traces as a byproduct of answering questions. We study how these traces can adapt a deployed dense retriever to changing workflow distributions without new relevance labels, synthetic queries, or LLM judgments. We introduce Navigation-Informed Embeddings (NIE), a family of trace-derived objectives. NIE-Stop turns the stopping document into a soft positive; NIE-Path additionally uses