A Parametric Memory Head for Continual Generative Retrieval
Mekonnen, K. A., et al. (2026). "A Parametric Memory Head for Continual Generative Retrieval." Proceedings of SIGIR 2026.
CV
Education
- 2023-Present: ELLIS PhD Researcher, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 2020-2023: MSc in Data Science, University of Trento, Italy
- 2019-2020: MSc in Machine Intelligence, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences / AMMI, Rwanda
- 2013-2017: BSc in Computer Science, University of Gondar, Ethiopia
Experience
- Apr. 2022-Oct. 2022: Data Science Research Intern, Nanovery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
- 2017-2019: Assistant Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Gondar, Ethiopia
Research Interests
- Generative information retrieval and generative modeling for retrieval
- Neural information retrieval and recommender systems
- Multilingual and low-resource retrieval
- Continual learning for retrieval systems
- Robust decoding and evaluation for generative retrieval
- Retrieval-augmented generation and large-scale machine learning
- Multimodal learning and reinforcement learning for retrieval and recommendation
Skills
- Information retrieval
- Machine learning
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Generative modeling
- Multimodal learning
- Reinforcement learning
- Multilingual retrieval evaluation
Publications
Lost in Decoding? Reproducing and Stress-Testing the Look-Ahead Prior in Generative Retrieval
Mekonnen, K. A., et al. (2026). "Lost in Decoding? Reproducing and Stress-Testing the Look-Ahead Prior in Generative Retrieval." Proceedings of SIGIR 2026.
uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking
Lupart, S., Mekonnen, K., Abbasiantaeb, Z., and Aliannejadi, M. (2026). "uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking." Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, 2972–2980.
The Multilingual Curse at the Retrieval Layer: Evidence from Amharic
Alemneh, Y. W.*, Mekonnen, K. A.*, and de Rijke, M. (2026). "The Multilingual Curse at the Retrieval Layer: Evidence from Amharic." The 1st Workshop on Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models, ACL 2026. *Equal contribution.
Optimized Text Embedding Models and Benchmarks for Amharic Passage Retrieval
Mekonnen, K. A., et al. (2025). "Optimized Text Embedding Models and Benchmarks for Amharic Passage Retrieval." Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Lightweight and Direct Document Relevance Optimization for Generative Information Retrieval
Mekonnen, K. A., et al. (2025). "Lightweight and Direct Document Relevance Optimization for Generative Information Retrieval." Proceedings of SIGIR 2025.
Conditioning GAN Without Training Dataset
Mekonnen, K. A. (2024). "Conditioning GAN Without Training Dataset." arXiv preprint.
Adv-KD: Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Faster Diffusion Sampling
Mekonnen, K. A., Dall'Asen, N., and Rota, P. (2024). "Adv-KD: Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Faster Diffusion Sampling." arXiv preprint.
Balanced Face Dataset: Guiding StyleGAN to Generate Labeled Synthetic Face Image Dataset for Underrepresented Group
Mekonnen, K. A. (2023). "Balanced Face Dataset: Guiding StyleGAN to Generate Labeled Synthetic Face Image Dataset for Underrepresented Group." arXiv preprint.
Talks
Teaching
Service and leadership
- Teaching Assistant, Recommender Systems (MSc Artificial Intelligence), University of Amsterdam, June 2025 and June 2026
- Teaching Assistant, AddisCoder; programming and algorithms outreach
- Hackathon mentor and organizer support, European Summer School on Information Retrieval, ESSIR 2024
- Mentor, MeetMentors
- Core Team Volunteer, Women in AI & Robotics, Sep. 2021-Apr. 2022
- Volunteer, Women in AI, Sep. 2020-Sep. 2021
- Reviewing and community service in information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing venues