Reasoning Opens up New Retrieval Frontiers

Hosted by Orion Weller, Hamel Husain, and Shreya Shankar

Mon, Jul 7, 2025

9:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Evals For Engineers & PMs
Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar
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What you'll learn

Neural Retrieval Beyond Semantic Search

Neural RAG doesn’t need to be about barebones semantic search: find out what’s next.

Retrievers Can Follow Instructions

Hear directly from one of the leading researchers in the domain how retrieval is moving towards instruction-following.

Chatbots Can Reason, So Can Retrievers

Learn about how retrieval is increasingly moving towards the same reasoning paradigm as LLMs to understand what makes a

Why this topic matters

Just as prompting for language models has enabled complex user tasks and zero-shot optimization via prompts, so can prompts in retrieval enable complex information needs with zero-shot adaptation. In this talk, we describe efforts to move beyond semantic search by building retrieval models that can follow user instructions, be prompted, and find relevant documents through reasoning capabilities.

You'll learn from

Orion Weller

RAG and Information Retrieval Researcher at John Hopkins

Orion is a 5th year PhD student at Johns Hopkins University affiliated with the Center for Speech and Language Processing and advised by Benjamin Van Durme and Dawn Lawrie. His work primarily focuses on measuring and improving the capabilities of information retrieval models and retrieval-augmented generation with language models. His work is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and has won paper awards at the Conference on Language Models (CoLM) and the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).

Hamel Husain

ML Engineer with 20 years of experience

Hamel is a machine learning engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.


Shreya Shankar

ML Systems Researcher Making AI Evaluation Work in Practice

Shreya is an experienced ML Engineer who is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at UC Berkeley, where she builds systems that help people use AI to work with data effectively. Her research focuses on developing practical tools and frameworks for building reliable ML systems, with recent groundbreaking work on LLM evaluation and data quality. She has published influential papers on evaluating and aligning LLM systems, including "Who Validates the Validators?" which explores how to systematically align LLM evaluations with human preferences.

Prior to her PhD, Shreya worked as an ML engineer in industry and completed her BS and MS in computer science at Stanford. Her work appears in top data management and HCI venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, and UIST. She is currently supported by the NDSEG Fellowship and has collaborated extensively with major tech companies and startups to deploy her research in production environments. Her recent projects like DocETL and SPADE demonstrate her ability to bridge theoretical frameworks with practical implementations that help developers build more reliable AI systems.

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