arXiv AI

Rethinking Retrieval in the Long-Context Era: Training-Free Semantic Trees for Adaptive Context Construction

The paper introduces TreeFuse, a training‑free framework that builds a semantic hierarchy from a full document and uses it to select and organize evidence for a query. By combining structural–semantic scoring with lexical attribution, TreeFuse retains supporting facts and relations while focusing the context on the question. Experiments on four large‑context models show a 1.72‑point improvement in QA‑F1 over full‑context prompting and a 58.55% reduction in answer‑context length.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

ReContext: Recursive Evidence Replay as LLM Harness for Long-Context Reasoning

Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications. Although recent LLMs support increasingly long context windows, they often fail to use relevant evidence that is already present in the input, revealing a gap between context access and effective context utilization.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

The Bottleneck Is Retrieval, Not Reading: Diagnosing Evidence-Based Generation with RAG for Long Context Question Answering

arXiv:2610.26951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the dominant paradigm for grounding large language models in external corpora, but its similarity-driven, chunk...

By Debopriyo Banerjee, Owais Aijaz, Ahmer Tabassum, Zhuohan Xie, Preslav Nakov, Veselin Stoyanov
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Highlight-Then-Summarize: Learning to Compress Evidence for Long-Context Understanding

The paper introduces Highlight-Then-Summarize (H2S), a two-step approach that first highlights question-relevant evidence in long documents and then condenses it into a compact, question-conditioned summary before generating an answer. The authors built the H2S-Dataset with 6,647 examples spanning 11 benchmark families, and developed H2S-RL to reward evidence selection and summary construction. Evaluated on the H2S-Bench suite, the H2S-14B model outperforms larger open-source models, achieving the highest overall score and maintaining strong performance even with a reduced output budget.

By Zhaoyuan Xia (Peking University, Baidu Inc), Qinghongbing Xie (Tsinghua University), Yung Xiang Hue (Tsinghua University), Jianguang Jiang (Baidu Inc), Gaofeng Lu (Baidu Inc), Zhenyu Jiao (Baidu Inc), Xing Yuan (Baidu Inc), Dai Dai (Baidu Inc), Tong Mo (Peking University), Long Zeng (Tsinghua University)
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

LongZero: Enhancing Long-Context Reasoning in LLMs from Zero Data

LongZero is a reinforcement learning method that enables large language models to improve long‑context reasoning without external data. It works by having the model first generate a compact, structured question‑answer pair with supporting evidence, then expanding that evidence into a long, multi‑document context. The approach combines self‑written multi‑hop reasoning and multi‑round retrieval tasks, trained with GRPO, and outperforms baseline RL methods on five long‑context reasoning benchmarks.

By Zhennan Wan, Jianfei Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Where to Look and What to Use: Retrieve-Localize-Generate for Long-Term Conversational Memory Question Answering

arXiv:2609.07093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions by accessing external knowledge and has been widely a...

By Yifan Wang, Xinkui Lin, Yongxiu Xu, Shen Gao, Ruochen Yang, Kun Huang, Yubin Wang, Jie Wu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu, Shuo Shang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

REFACT: Adaptive Fact Restatement for Compact and Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models increasingly rely on long-form reasoning for complex tasks, yet their reasoning traces may drift away from the supplied context when evidence is sparse, noisy, or in conflict with parametric knowledge. Existing grounding methods either attach citations after generation or encourage evidence retrieval inside the trace, but they often do not ensure that cited content is sufficient for the local inference and final answer.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Co-Evolving Structured Knowledge and Reasoning in Language Models

The paper introduces KBevo, a co‑evolving framework that simultaneously builds a structured knowledge base and performs reasoning over it for knowledge‑intensive question answering. By optimizing both components end‑to‑end with QA outcome rewards, the system improves the quality and connectivity of the knowledge base, leading to higher answer reachability and better compositional factual reasoning. Compared to standard retrieval baselines, KBevo offers greater controllability and improved factual accuracy.

By Ryan Thomas Noonan, Linxi Zhao, Menghan Xu, Akanksha Sarkar, Mihir Mishra, Dongyoung Go, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Yoav Artzi, Jennifer J. Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

LongHarness Bench: Stress-Testing Language Model Harnesses for Long-Context Reasoning

The paper introduces LongHarness Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both the effectiveness and efficiency of language model harnesses for long-context reasoning. It features tasks that require diverse retrieval strategies—such as lexical search and semantic matching—and strategic, adaptive reasoning over global and local context, with only a small subset of the context being useful at each step. Evaluations across multiple state‑of‑the‑art models and harnesses show that even strong combinations achieve only 68% macro‑average accuracy, and that the same model can vary markedly in efficiency depending on the harness used.

By Quang Hieu Pham, Thuy Duong Nguyen, Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen, Xi Ye