arXiv AI

Optimizing RAG Rerankers with LLM Feedback via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.

arXiv AI
Aug 13

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.

By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi
arXiv AI
Sep 17

One Size Does Not Fit All! Dynamic Retriever and Generator Selection for RAG

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

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.

By Teng Chen, Sheng Xu, Feixiang Guo, Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Generative Reasoning Re-ranker

arXiv:2602. 07774v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge.

By Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
arXiv AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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