Telecom question answering (QA) is a challenging setting for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): evidence is fragmented across standards, papers, encyclopedic resources, and web documents, and answers often hinge on technical tables, equations, and specialized protocol language. In low-resource subdomains, generator fine-tuning can over-specialize and degrade general capability, making query-side retriever adaptation an attractive alternative.
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.
By Neeraj Anand, Payel Santra, Partha Basuchowdhuri, Debasis Ganguly, Sumit Bhatia
The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."
By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
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:2606. 29090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty.
By Ansh Kamthan
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.
By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez, Marie Puren
arXiv:2603. 26667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) turns external documents into evidence for large language models.
By Xu Sun, Tongkai Xu, Baiheng Xie, Li Huang, Qiang Gao, Kunpeng Zhang
arXiv:2509.20377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks...
By Tomoaki Isoda
arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
By Yuhang Wu, Xiangqing Shen, Fanfan Wang, Cangqi Zhou, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Rui Xia
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty. This wastes computation on easy questions, starves hard ones, and gives no signal for when a generated answer can be trusted.
arXiv:2604. 00715v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves language model (LM) performance by providing relevant context at test time for knowledge-intensive situations.
By Karan Singh, Michael Yu, Varun Gangal, Zhuofu Tao, Sachin Kumar, Emmy Liu, Steven Y. Feng
arXiv:2606. 04646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many real-world questions over business, legal, and scientific corpora are natural-language versions of database-style queries over records latent in text.
By Mengao Zhang, Xiang Yang, Chang Liu, Tianhui Tan, Ke-wei Huang