arXiv AI

Parametric Knowledge in RAG-SFT for Domain-Specific Document Generation

The paper investigates Retrieval-Augmented Generation fine‑tuning (RAG‑SFT) for generating requirements documents in electronics engineering, comparing two 7B models trained with different data strategies. It introduces a claim‑based evaluation pipeline, C‑FEX, and a new metric, Parametric Knowledge Precision (PKP), to assess factuality of model‑generated claims. Results show that fine‑tuned 7B models can match or surpass a 72B baseline, but standard metrics may mislead, and fine‑tuning reduces hallucination by encouraging more reliable use of parametric knowledge.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Parameters vs. Context: TRACE Fine-Tuning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces TRACE, a fine‑tuning framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses conflicts between retrieved knowledge and a model’s internal knowledge. TRACE uses multi‑agent debate traces to identify correct and incorrect candidates and answer‑shift patterns, providing fine‑grained supervision for reliable knowledge‑source selection. It also incorporates an answer‑completeness regularization mechanism to prevent empty, overly short, or prematurely terminated responses, thereby improving robustness against misleading retrieved content and enhancing answer quality.

By Zhengchen Huang, Yundong Sun, Minrui Song, Shuanglong Yao, Ye Liu, Ji Chen, Xing Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Assessing the Downstream Utility of Evidence-Aware Retrieval in RAG

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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 27

AB-RAG: Adaptive Budgeted Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Question Answering

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 Computation and Language
Aug 25

W-RAG: Source-Aware Retrieval for Enterprise Document Generation from Heterogeneous Knowledge Bases

W-RAG is a source-aware retrieval framework designed for enterprise document generation from heterogeneous knowledge bases. It uses ontology-guided retrieval, local ranking within each knowledge base, and source-level weighting to balance evidence from diverse sources. A new dataset covering multiple document types and industry domains demonstrates that W-RAG improves document coverage and generation quality compared to standard RAG pipelines.

By Hridya Dhulipala, Rajesh Ombase, Michael Wang, Tien N. Nguyen