The paper presents a controlled comparison of six retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategies for scientific question answering on a large arXiv corpus. All pipelines use the same LLM generator and evaluation protocol, differing only in retrieval design—ranging from classic dense retrieval to late‑interaction methods like ColBERTv2. The authors also release a synthetic question dataset and code to enable reproducible, large‑scale evaluation of RAG trade‑offs.
arXiv:2608. 03860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19.
arXiv:2606. 28367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is routinely extended with methods meant to improve retrieval: query expansion, hierarchical and cross-document summarization, graph-based expansion, per-query routing, rank fusion, and corrective re-retrieval.
Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.
arXiv:2607. 23006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific question answering requires a retrieval system to solve two distinct problems: identifying which papers are relevant and locating the supporting evidence within those papers.
Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Knowledge Graph Expansion, RRF Fusion, and Per-Chunk Grounded Evaluation for Enterprise Document Search describes DocuSearch, an offline multi‑agent system designed for telecom network operations. The system combines semantic vector search, BM25 full‑text search, and knowledge‑graph neighbor expansion, merges the results via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and reranks with a cross‑encoder before pruning with Maximal Marginal Relevance. A per‑chunk evaluation loop ensures only grounded answers are returned, achieving Precision@10 of 0.69, Recall@10 of 0.79, and an 89.6% grounding rate—improvements of 15, 16, and 18.4 percentage points over a dense‑only baseline.
The paper introduces ORDER, a task‑conditioned retrieval‑augmented generation framework that dynamically adapts both indexing and retrieval strategies to each incoming query. It first clusters questions to learn cluster‑specific chunking, metadata filtering, and reranking settings, then routes queries to the appropriate pre‑built index via nearest‑centroid assignment. Additionally, a supervised query router predicts relevant collections and a Uniform Multi‑source Sampler distributes the retrieval budget evenly across selected sources, yielding superior performance on heterogeneous historical archives compared to existing RAG systems.
arXiv:2604. 23336v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs.
The paper introduces DRAG, a query‑adaptive framework that jointly selects retriever and generator configurations for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Two variants are presented: DRAG_QPP, a training‑free routing method using Query Performance Prediction and perplexity signals, and DRAG_SFT, a supervised approach that fine‑tunes an LLM to predict configurations. Experiments on three LLM families and four QA benchmarks show that DRAG_QPP matches strong static baselines while cutting inference latency, and DRAG_SFT consistently outperforms both static and training‑free adaptive baselines, demonstrating a better effectiveness‑efficiency trade‑off.
arXiv:2509. 16780v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show promise as educational aids but often lack alignment with specific course materials.
Lit3R is a system developed by tus-nlp for the LitTraceQA shared task, which focuses on evidence-grounded question answering over scientific literature. The system combines off-the-shelf retrieval, reranking, and large language model components without task-specific training, using an iterative retrieval process that merges BM25-based sparse and dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and LLM verification, along with paper-to-paper expansion. In the official test set, Lit3R achieved a 4th place ranking on the leaderboard.
arXiv:2608.21252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Question answering (QA) over long, connected documents remains challenging because relevant evidence may span multiple entities and their relationshi...
The paper introduces EGT-KG, an evidence‑grounded typed knowledge graph retrieval framework designed to enhance scientific question answering with small language models (SLMs). It compares three QA settings—standard Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and two EGT‑KG variants (automatically generated and expert‑defined relation schemas)—using a six‑dimensional evaluation on a biopolymer‑bound soil composite literature benchmark. Results show that both EGT‑KG variants outperform vanilla RAG, with the llama3:8b model achieving a final score of 70.37 (+14.67%) and 68.82 (+12.14%) for the AS and ES variants, respectively.