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
The paper introduces BRIE, a continuously maintainable benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in electronic health record (EHR) information retrieval. It presents a scalable framework that automatically generates question–answer pairs from longitudinal EHR notes, validated by nineteen clinicians. The benchmark allows assessment of multiple inference strategies and highlights that state‑of‑the‑art LLMs often miss clinically important information, especially when synthesis across documents is required.
By Jordan L. Cahoon, Chloe O. Stanwyck, Sulaiman Somani, Philip Chung, Kevin R Keet, Kameron C. Black, Andrea T. Fisher, Sarita Khemani, Jerry Liu, Stephen Ma, Saloni K. Maharaj, Rita M. Pandya, Eduardo Perez-Guerrero, Priyanka Pillai, Lisa Shieh, David J. H. Wu, James Xie, James C. McAvoy, Teresa Nguyen, Jessica Tran, Lucy Yin, Bridget Lin, Alison Callahan, Jason A. Fries, Nigam H. Shah, Emily Alsentzer
The paper introduces BRIE, a scalable framework that automatically creates question–answer pairs from longitudinal electronic health record notes, validated by nineteen clinicians. It offers a continuously maintainable benchmark for evaluating large language models in clinical settings, addressing limitations of manual, costly, and quickly outdated existing benchmarks. Experiments across nine LLMs and five inference strategies reveal that even state‑of‑the‑art systems often miss clinically important information, especially for synthesis‑heavy queries.
The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.
By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
By Chandan Kumar Sah, Xiaoli Lian, Li Zhang
arXiv:2606. 15735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discharge summaries are crucial clinical documents containing the context of a patient's overall hospital stay, and are routinely reviewed by medical experts for patient readmission, ongoing care, and diagnostic decision-making.
By Jiyoun Kim, Muhan Yeo, Eunhye Jang, Jeewon Yang, Hangyul Yoon, Su Ji Lee, Hee Jo Han, Hee-Jae Jung, Doyun Kwon, Jun young Lee, Jaehun Lee, Jung-Oh Lee, Sunjun Kweon, Jong Hak Moon, Daseul Kim, Minjae Cho, Edward Choi
The paper investigates whether incorporating an evidence-support signal into retrieval evaluation for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) improves downstream decision‑making. Across multiple benchmarks and a TREC RAG 2025 setting, the evidence signal alters retriever rankings but its benefits vary: it does not consistently enhance retriever training, its usefulness for system selection depends on generator instructions, and it does not reliably predict answer quality on unseen topics. Human filtering of evidence‑rich passages preserves useful content, yet evaluators disagree on whether this improves final answers, indicating that evidence‑aware evaluation alone does not guarantee better downstream outcomes.
By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
arXiv:2604. 04593v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external medical knowledge, yet standard retrievers frequently surface hard negatives that are semantically close to the query but describe clinically distinct conditions.
By Byeolhee Kim, Min-Kyung Kim, Young-Hak Kim, Tae-Joon Jeon
arXiv:2606. 06197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Question answering (QA) systems have achieved notable progress with the advent of large language models (LLMs).
By Hafez Abdelghaffar, Ahmed Alansary, Ali Hamdi
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
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.
By Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md. Hasibul Hasan, Rofiqul Alam Shehab, Asab Azad
arXiv:2504. 07385v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly used for question-answering (QA), relying on static, pre-annotated references for evaluation poses significant challenges in cost, scalability, and completeness.
By Sher Badshah, Ali Emami, Hassan Sajjad