@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-mindref,
    title = "{M}ind{R}ef: Mimicking Human Memory for Hierarchical Reference Retrieval with Fine-Grained Location Awareness",
    author = "Wang, Ye  and
      Xu, Xinrun  and
      Ding, Zhiming",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-short.67/",
    pages = "857--872",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-252-7",
    abstract = "When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need an answer and a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to recall reference passage from any starting position independently. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, and then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage locations in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assists downstream tasks."
}